The Ultimate Lego Experience

Something really cool happened to us this week.
As you know, we really love Lego at our house. And this week, we were lucky enough to experience an ultimate Lego fan moment.

This year, Lego is celebrating 50 years in Australia. They have been celebrating with the 'Festival of Play' all year. Back in October, they asked the question 'what would you do with 50000 green Lego bricks?".

Well, I don't know whether I told you, but we've been making our own Christmas tree out of Lego. Oliver and I made one last year, and he and Anthony made this year's one. It's s nice change from the usual gacky ones, and it brings a little bit of fun into a time of year that we don't usually enjoy all that much.

Anyway, I sent them a photo of last year's tree:

And the next thing you know, we had won!
We had to keep it a secret for a couple of weeks, which was hard, but we (kinda) managed it.

So anyway, on Wednesday, Ryan McNaught, some lovely public relations folks and a whole bunch of media turned up at our house. Along with a 2m high Christmas tree made out of green Lego bricks.

It was a lot of fun watching Ryan, Anthony and Oliver put the tree together, and even more fun to see the media circus! At one point there were about 15 people in our tiny living/lounge room, plus a bunch of cameras and lights. They took lots of really nice photos (some of which are available here), and interviewed Oli, who was well and truly sick of holding the 'let's put a star on the tree' pose by the 37th time:

After everyone had left, he said 'I never want to see another camera again!'.

We got some good coverage; in the Australian, AAP, the Canberra Times, WIN news and the lovely photos on the Festival of Play website. My little fella was a celebrity for a minute - especially at school - but I'm hoping it's not his only 15 minutes of fame.

Everybody asks us what we're going to do with a massive Christmas tree. Well, we know that we can move it around the place pretty easily, as we packed it all up and took it out to the Cotter yesterday for the CLUG (Canberra Lego Users Group) Christmas party. It transported very well, and didn't take all that long to take down and put back up.

So, we thought it would be nice to offer it to a few different venues next year, where it can be displayed to raise money for charity. We will probably also take it to the Brick Expo next year too.
In between, we'll probably leave it up. I'm no good with indoor plants, so we can take the decorations off and put it in the corner! Anthony's building a shed out the back that will be a rumpus (Lego) room, so that will be a good spot for it.

All in all, a very cool experience! Thanks Lego and Ryan McNaught!