I bought myself a LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar (75184) this year – the first time I’ve had an advent calendar of any sort for ages. And I also got the neat promotional set 24-in-1 (40253) free with a reasonable purchase from the LEGO shop online a couple of weeks ago. Both sets come in colourful boxes with great images on the front, which give you a good idea of what you can expect to build.

Of course, the Advent Calendar will be unveiled one day at a time, but the 24-in-1 required me to empty the contents into a sorting tray and start rummaging! There appears to be a good selection of pieces in plenty of interesting colours and yes, another pesky orange Brick Separator! The instruction booklet is substantial with decent step-by-step guides to each model (and advice to use that brick separator at the end of each day, ready for the next one!). Parts are re-used so you won’t be able to make all 24 models at once, but that seemed fair enough.

So what were today’s builds? The Star Wars calendar instructions appear on the rear of each door as you open them. No. 1 hid a charming little Ghost ship, nice and colourful and a few decent details around the sides.

Meanwhile we had a different sort of ship with the 24-in-1 – a Tall Ship with treasure aboard! Quite a cute model and an inventive use of the wing pieces for sails.

I had also bought myself what I thought was a nice little Christmas Tree model with a couple of minifigs and presents around it. I was quite disappointed on opening it that it just appeared to contain enough pieces to make the minifigs, presents and a “star” for the top of the “tree” – which was just a print on a cardboard box inside!

I must admit to feeling pretty cheated by this packaging:

I had genuinely assumed the tree would be in there too, and rather disappointing that it wasn’t. Do you find the first picture misleading?