REVIEW: Advent calendar 7 December 2024

I’ve been wrong a lot this year, but today I’m pretty sure I know what will be behind door number 7. Will I be right though, or are we due for yet another surprise? Read on to see what we got…

So with the Draco minifigure yesterday along with the base of the Slytherin house statue, I was pretty sure today would be the statue itself. And (finally) I was right in one of my guesses (to be fair, I did pick up that 1 December most likely would be Harry Potter).

The bag of bricks clearly showed the green Slytherin colour for the base and plenty of grey bricks for the statue itself.

In the bag we got 16 pieces today – again a decent number – with two of them being spares.

Being a lazy weekend, I tried building a few models from the pieces without looking at the instructions (or the box at all) first.

Basically, I was trying to build a statue that would scream Slytherin, similar to the statue we got earlier for Gryffindor. Here you can see my two creations:

The first one I struggled with the wedge pieces (wings). Maybe a dragon? Or a gargoyle of some sort with wings to make it look more scary? Then I tried to do something more like a snake, using the “wings” as the side. But it certainly didn’t look like a snake.

So then I built the “official” version from the instructions.

It does very closely look like my first attempt. I assume it is a snake with wings (using the gargoyle theory, though gargoyles certainly doesn’t have to have wings)?

Here you can see it on its Slytherin base. Glad the snake is on there, so you don’t have to guess it from the model itself!

Anyway, Draco seems to be pretty happy with it (he’s showing his happy face):

While I was successful with my guess – I think I’ve been wrong earlier on. On 3 December, I presented the table there as the Gryffindor table as it followed from first Harry Potter and then the Gryffindor statue/koala bear, and advent calendars used to have models following a logical order. Well, while the table top is yellow (one of the Gryffindor colours), it is also typically used for Hufflepuff a couple of readers have pointed out (thanks heaps). And the table is full of food – which certainly would attract Hufflepuff students (though I’m sure Ron as well). So I’ll now rebrand it the Hufflepuff table.

I should here add that I never look at the box front or back other than when I buy the set (and even then trying not to pick up any details to have more surprises when opening the different doors. There may be giveaways on the box that would make this clear for everyone else, but hey – I love surprises!

Summary

I really like the idea with the statues/gargoyles, but I this one doesn’t really scream Slytherin to me and none of the pieces are that interesting. It may be hard to do a better Slytherin statue at this scale, but I’ll still give it a low’ish score of 2.5 house points out of five (and that is with half a point added due to the decent part count).

Now we got two minifigures, two tables and two statues, but only one tree? I don’t think we’ll get four trees in total, but maybe we will get a second one? Or maybe we’ll get some presents to put under the tree? I think that will be my guess for tomorrow. Remember to check 2024 Advent Calendar page again tomorrow to see what we got.

Till then, Build the Magic!