So every year with stuff ourselves with loads of food, so let's see what is usually on the menu and not bad indeed the selection is wide and the quantity is huge.
Since it is Christmas, there is no sparing the turkeys out there.
Of course we Chinese cannot do without pork in our meals, so here is a chunk of ham.
My favourite is the sausages and they did not last out very long. Most of them were consumed by the end of this dinner and there were not leftovers for lunch today.
Potatoes here act as fillers.
Strangely there was a Chinese style dish among it all but this i avoided eating since it was green.
After dinner my niece set out to the raid the Christmas tree for her presents. Most of what you can see below I think are hers...
To round it all off, we had a nice log cake for dessert and shown here by my niece.
It was pretty good so there was not much left.
So this afternoon I continue adding the last bits of the set and now present to you this year's Winter Village of mine!
Left side you have a shed with log and in the background people are busy selling pine trees. The snow plow is going off to somewhere to clear the heavy snow around the Winter Village.
In the central part of the city is of course the magnificent Christmas tree surrounding with presents at the base. Slightly in front is a frozen over lake and someone has got his head stuck. At the moment an EOD bomb disposal machine is going to attempt to extract him! While a police and crook are chillaxing and watching the drama.
Hard at work this time of the year are the postmen rushing to deliver all the mail and goods. Here the chef is offering him some tasty treats from his bakery shop.
Others have taken a pit stop to buy some goodies to munch on from the stall owner who is a scientist concocting special recipes for this festive occasion. Hopefully that guy does not end up glowing in the dark after that.
Others like the stormtroopers and scout troopers who are on shore leave are already mixing up with the local ladies and toasting away.
Behind them is a firewoman who is cooking up a great treat on the bbq. Behind them
is a table all laid out with the good food.Someone hates the snow piling up around his area and is shoveling it away in the background
This year's Christmas fairy has dressed out in an astronaut with a jet pack.
The mountain yeti is cycling out to meeting his other highland yetis and look, Santa Claus has a present for him for his has been nice this year. The yeti is in no hurry as in this weather his Popsicle is in no risk of melting away, unlike the nice warm weather we have in Singapore.
Well how about riding on a sleigh instead of driving and it has zero carbon emissions!
The one the right side are playing music while having a six-pack of the famous red can soft drink that shall not be named.
Last night I
tried getting all the light bricks turned on but the pictures did not
look that great but still merry Christmas to all. The sign is still the
same old one as last year. If I can I will upgrade it to a red and green
one next year!
Update: I tried again this time at another angle which I think improved how well a person can see the whole setup but it seems a little dark. Oh well.
So that is all from me this year, until next year where I will expand the Winter Village a bit more and I hope to find a chance to get a heck a lot more white base plates so that I can make the whole base white!
Time to finish up all the Lego Christmas themed builds. My family has gathered for the usual stuffing. I do not mean the food but more that the whole family sits down for one humongous meal and stuff ourselves even more crazy then those turkeys. More of that in another post soon. I want to follow up and finish the Lego building theme. As a finale, here is the last build on Christmas day itself.
The main build of the Winter Village Cottage is of course the cottage itself. It features 4 minifigures in it, one which strangely due to the hair piece looks very oriental to me.
One of the strange parts about the build is that the polybags do not go exactly along with the instruction manual. By the end of the first book, the cottage was not fully up as can be seen below.
Of course I had to test the light brick function...which worked well. This time it is the fireplace which cannot be seen outside the cottage itself, this was different from the other previous 3 sets where you could see a window lit up.
The whole build when completed looks pretty neat.
It hits the colour combination in all the right notes for me: Dark green, dark blue, medium blue, etc. The interesting part of the build is of course how they made the roof look more full of snow.
Finally the back of the cottage when fully assembled. One downside I find for me is if one is playing and trying to put minifigures at the kitchen side, it is rather hard but to the tight squeeze.
Will post shots of the whole Winter Village mashed up together in another post. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to all and for those who object to the Christian slant of this greeting, then Happy Holidays to you. Time for me to hit the sack. Until then.
The 4th one was sadly a filler, all when I was feeling so upbeat about the last few builds. Thankfully, it is a small build and does not detract from the overall experience. It is a pull sled? Or just a sled. Made of small parts mostly and probably the nicest part must be that bucket.
It uses shovel pieces as skids and underneath they use trans-clear studs to make it appear to float a bit.
Going to start on a rush to finish all the remaining builds!
Embarrassingly, I just discovered I could not count. It is actually 2 more days to Christmas...
The 3rd build in the Winter Village Cottage is a shed that hold logs and it is made of again colours that I really like, like tan, dark tan, medium blue and dark green. Seriously, these people really know what makes the sets look great.
Here we have the logger waving around his humongous chainsaw, ready to bring down some pine tree to bring home and some logs to get the fire place going!
The countdown is coming to an end but I still got some parts not built yet, so I got to hurry and get them up in time to take some dioramas on day zero!
The next one might be what you can consider a filler. Lego makes many many cars throughout their sets day in day out. So I guess this set did not manage to escape that terror and for this set, It is a flat bed truck with a snow plough.
The nice part about building this vehicle is that it uses quite a few SNOT. The side of the engine is one, the door is using tiles and the flat bed behind is tiled all over. Finally the snow plough can be detached. This to me, makes this slightly more than a filler. Ha, I am actually impressed by this build, which I thought initially that I would find boring.
Even the mud guards are quite well made in this set. The wheels have 2 patterns available so if you want another design then all you have to do is to flip it.
So the good people of the Winter Village now have something that can help them shovel snow mechanically and quickly instead of relying on manpower alone. Fantastic. The best part for me is that Lego built this using a lot of my favourite colours, them namely being tan, dark tan and dark blue. Yeah, this is a good build after all.
We now start on the Winter Village Cottage which was actually last year's release but if you are like me who lived in Singapore, then it only came in 1st quarter 2013 and if things are like before, we will only get the Winter Village Market next year. Woe is those who live here.
At the point of its release, it was the largest set among the Winter Village sets and still is. Correspondingly, the price increase is rather steep but the price per brick ratio is respectable, especially if you get this at 20% off or on eBay, which then brings it to around the price of SGD$160.
The back of the box is great, with such a large set, they squeezed in 3 smaller build in addition to the cottage. This really gives kids many possibilities of making different scenes that they like. Other winter village sets also do this which is what is the great thing about these sets.
The set come with the same standard with come to expect from Lego, the instruction manuals are put in a separate bag with a cardboard backing. Only 4 white large plates came outside of the polybags. Talking about polybags, this set come with 18 whopping polybags.
The polybags are numbered divided into 3 parts but there are 5 builds. So we start with the igloo. This build is more like a warm up, it is nice and cute but is quite quick to build but the big pine tree is a nice addition to my collection. So it the owl too, that is a nice addition to anyone's collection. For the minifigures, oh well they are pretty run of the mill to me. I think I have seen their faces too many times. Would have been nice to get other kinds of head pieces but hey you win some, you lose some. Let us see how the next build will be.
Yeah, a bit late again for this as I came back from a gathering with friends. So here is the rest of the set.
I think what makes this set especially nice is the fact that it comes with 3 small pine trees. I think most larger sets you would find one or two of them only. The only part which I gripe is the fact that it only has small pine trees, how I wished this one had a large one replacing one of the small ones.
The other thing I like was the lilac coloured cap which is found only in a few other sets, it is really makes the minifigure stand out.
The instruction booklet provided is like all the standard instruction manual except it usually small and compact, folded so that it fits into the package.
The back of it has a pitch for last year's Winter Village Cottage and this year's Winter Village Market which really do look good together of course, to tempt us all to buy more which of course I do fall for.
Christmas is fast approaching us, have you done finish your last minute shopping yet? The tress stand
must be one brisk business since so little trees are left. One
interesting fact, a real chopped pine tree after being shipped in from
Europe to Singapore is cheaper than a fake plastic one! I know I
will have to ramp up my building of the other Christmas sets for sure
but the weekend is now here for me to play catch up!
Man been a busy day, so much so that I am not able to make a proper build today but I leave you with this simple entry from a 2013 Christmas Exclusive!
This set I bought because I just saw so many pine trees in it. It has 3 pine trees and the stand looks pretty good too but that will have to wait either tomorrow or the weekend for me to build it and post it. The back tempts us to get the other set, 40083 Christmas Tree truck but I will probably get it next year when the price falls, post-Christmas blues or whatnot.
These sets usually come with flimsy instruction booklets and this set did not disappoint me one bit.
To make up for it, the 2 minifigures that came with it, had 2 unusual headgear. Not that it really makes up for the instruction booklet truth be told.
Okay, that is for it now, will definitely finish this set in the next post and will ramp up my build since Christmas is getting near....
With all the 3 previous Winter Village sets assembled, it is now time to start on the new sets that I have started acquiring over the course of this year!
We start off with the 2012 Christmas exclusive, boringly named Lego 3300014 2012 Christmas Set. The box may be dented a little but the polybags in it are still good and sealed.
The back shows a simple scene with nothing much different compared to the front artwork. This is a pretty small and quite build.
It comes with a small folded instruction booklet, 2 polybags and 2 pieces that are large hence they are found outside the polybags.
This set although small provides quite a number of minifigures plus a horse. I like the gentleman who will be the slave driver of the horse later on. The face piece is quite uncommon and is only found in 8 other sets, 3 of which are Christmas ones!
Not sure how this Google Awesome Photo thing works but some of my uploaded photos are getting the treatment. Below is one half of this set. Like most Christmas sets, the lamp post is assembled using uncommon parts with SNOT techniques.
Next up is the sleigh part, where the other 3 minifigures are almost torturing the poor horsie!
Overall a fun build it is. I like the gentlemen and the lamp post in it as I find them quite unique and uncommon. Like all exclusives which are small, the price per piece of this set is certainly nothing to brag about. At 109 pieces for almost SGD$40, it probably is not something that one buys because it is a good deal but more because of the festive cheer that surrounds it.
For those with Winter Village sets, this complements it, but for others who do not, there is no real harm in skipping this set at all.
My second last set from my existing set is a small one from the Winter Village Toy Shop and it features a small young boy in need of being taught by the SPCA how to take care of dogs.
Seems that early in life he understands the carrot and the stick approach and has modified this for dog training, using the bone and the whip.
