The long awaited Advent Calendar has arrived in a huge box, it's so big my first thought was the line from Molly Weasley when she says "big box for Ron". I opened the outer-box to reveal a massive black gift box with packaging around the sides. This packaging is apparently the waste from the wool mill and consists of various fibre and yarns and there has been a bit of a challenge thrown out to see what we will do with it. Some have said they will bin it, some have said they will probably use it to protect garden plants from the frost and cold over the winter and some, like me, are considering the options, but there is a lot of it. My packaging weighs 584g!
I have no idea if I will use this, or not, but for now it is bagged up. It may yet end up in the compost bin or dug into the vegetable bed or something. I'm not sure yet but it is really soft.
So, onto the box, now that I can actually get it out of the outer box. It's huge, bigger than last year's, but it also feels relatively flimsy, compared to last year's so I'm not sure if its a size thing or whether it's a cheaper box. It's more matte and the wording is stuck on with some kind of tape, whereas last years box had a more shiny surface and the wording was properly printed onto the box. We did try to carefully peel the tape off but the lettering is coming with it so we pushed it back down. There is no magnetic closure on the box this year and the ribbon can be pulled through both parts of the box.
If I had bought this as a gift for someone else I would be a bit disappointed but I have bought this for myself and it is just the box and the most important things are inside, but even so...
The box is actually too big and so these didn't arrive neat like they are now, they were all over the place and I was a good girl and managed to stand them up without looking at the print on the front that details the name they've given to each one and the fibre contents. There was also a load of "sprinkles" inside the box, I'm not sure if they paper or a kind of plastic or laminated type material but they have the Aztec type print on them and they are shaped like sheep. Might use them for something, not sure, but they were a little annoying like when people put sprinkles and glitter inside birthday and Christmas cards and send them in the post to you for you to open and get covered in it all. Now that all the bags are all stood up the only print I can actually read clearly are the numbers of the days so I sorted them out in order. They are nice bags by the look of it, I didn't look at them in detail because I'd be able to read the contents and I don't want to but apparently they are resealable. The issues with these bags are that the details are printed on the outside and so can ruin the surprise and I store all of my fibre in clear bags so that I can see at an instant what the colour is so once I've opened each day I will most likely be cutting around the details to place it in a clear bag with the fibre. I wonder if they could have had a peel off piece placed over the name and fibre details so that all we see on delivery as the numbers on the bags. That would have been a solution.
I'm sure as the boxes arrive with their customers those of us who chat on their social media will express our views about what we like about it and what we don't like about it. I can't believe I start opening this in just over a week's time!
