Home Made Advent Calendar

Greetings ninjas!  I just got done making an advent calendar for my daughter.  It might sound a bit daunting to make one, but it was not as hard or expensive as I thought. Here are a few ideas to remember:

Lots of Minifigures:
It might seem tough to come with 24 separate gifts, but minifigures are a good place to start.  The Double Decker couch is a great value for that.  You get 5 of them, all main characters from the movie, and you get the couch and a small car. Its even on sale right now too!  You might also try the Batman and Angry Kitty set. This is also on sale. You get three minifigures, including a Batman and Uni Kitty variant, plus a micro manager for less than ten dollars. If you break them up into one small present per day, that's respectively 7 or 4 days worth of presents.

Some people don't like fake me outs, but your kids won't notice and they are a good way to expand your options for a small amount of money. For example, you can find a set of 24 DC and Marvel comic Lego (like) figures for 16 dollars. You might also try the build your own minifigure station at the Lego Store.  This lets you build three minifigures for 9.99. The advantage of this is that you can build something rather specialized.

Of course, you can't forget to check yard sales! I found the 5 minifigures below for a very good price. I paid 10 dollars for all of those figures, when just one Pharaoh is worth that price on Ebay!

  

Storage: 

Most families have a giant pile of Legos in storage.  The first option is to build something with that useless pile, and present that as a gift. Or you can take a bunch of pieces you think are good for building and make them a present.  You might also do a combination of both and in the picture you can see I made a snow flake stand for Anna.  I then took it apart slightly and then bagged it.  This option doesn't cost you any money, just a bit of time!

If you're not that creative don't worry, I'm not either, you might try to find instructions and sets online.  I found a very good reindeer and I could tell my daughter its Sven. The free montly Lego magazine has some instructions. This months' included a Christmas tree and basic reindeer.

Themed Candy:  

You'll also notice the picture includes some rock candy that looks like ice. I thought it was a great treat to go with all of her Legos.  I found a bag of rock candy online for about 5 dollars. This was a great low cost purchase and it ended up being 3 days worth of presents.  Of course, if you aren't that creative you can get some molds at a very good price. Then you can make jello, chocolate, and crayons in the shape of Lego men or bricks. 

Accessorize: 

If you read this blog regularly, you already know I love to pimp out my Legos. Along with your boxes of old Legos pieces you probably have a bunch of boring, faded minifigures from the 80s. You can buy some cool accessories that turn them into a Viking, Roman, gladiator (pictured above), space marine, or desperado.  Brick Forge is having a great sale on blind bags right now. You can get 10 minifigure parts in a bag that normally costs 3 dollars.  With the buy one get one free you get 20 parts for 3 dollars. (Plus a few dollars for shipping.) Its kind of blind luck on what you get, but you should get a good variety of pieces to spice up several of your Lego men. For comparison, buying the swords, armor, and helmet for that gladiator costs about 5 dollars on its own. So its a great deal.    

I also found a nice head of Anubis on Ebay. It was only 2 dollars, combined with some weapons and shipping I only spent about 8 dollars to get a very unique Lego. I used one of the torsos and feet from the evil foot soldiers in Guardians of the Galaxy and now its going to be one of the awesome parts of her collection. It goes really good with the Pharaoh I already have, and the Egyptian Queen I got as well. (My daughter is really liking Egyptian themed items right now. I blame Scooby Doo.) 

Here you'll see the final product, where I have a Pharaoh, Cleopatra, and Anubis ready for wrapping: 

Deals!!! 

As always, pay attention to deals.  I regularly highlight them on this blog.  One of the best I found was the old Mixel series that went on sale for one dollar!!!! This was an insane deal and I literally grabbed as much as I could carry.  For the calendar I mostly used Series 4 flying blue creatures. Keeping with the Frozen theme as much as possible I sold it to my daughter as Elsa's flying monkeys.  (She loves Wicked too so I thought she would understand it.) 

Use your Christmas Purchases: 

This method is somewhat different from finding good deals. This lets you buy your purchases like normal. Then you can divide up the pieces from the purchase.  Most 40 dollar sets have about 400 pieces and 5 minifigures. You can give them the minifigures once per day, and divide the pieces into small chunks.  Your child then builds whatever they can using the pieces they have and try to guess what the final product is.  Then on the last day you give them the instructions and they can see how well they guessed and then build the product as intended.  

So there you have it.  The normal advent calendars cost between 30 and 40 dollars (or even more if you wait until the end of November.) With some time, effort, and careful planning you can easily produce a calendar and all 24 gifts for far less than that. It will mean even more since you made the gifts very thoughtfully.  Of course, it will also be way more special. I showed my daughter that last picture and she was practically giddy.  As always, like me on facebook to receive the latest updates. Good luck ninjas!!