In case you missed out on this year’s holiday gift-with-purchase (GWP) set in the form of the LEGO Christmas Tree (40338), you might be interested to know that LEGO’s Customer Service has also uploaded the building instructions to recreate this set. You may download a copy of it right here.
It’s nice of LEGO to make the building instructions for their exclusive promotional sets – such as the Buildable Red Brick for example – available to the public particularly to LEGO fans that may have missed out on this promo. As part of its Black Friday deals, the LEGO Christmas Tree (40338) was only made available for four days from November 29 to December 2, for a minimum single-receipt purchase worth $120 USD. It obviously comes with a relatively higher qualifying purchase as compared to other promos, but as a freebie coming in at 392 pieces and with some pretty nice play features, I certainly have no qualms about it.
Check out its parts list below and see if you have them in your collection. Take note that there are some elements that are relatively rare or were recently introduced making them a bit hard to find. Examples of these are the 1/4 Arch Brick 5×5 in red variant only found in sets such as the exclusive promotional LEGOLAND Park (40346) set, and the LEGO Creator Expert London Bus (10258) from 2017. There’s also the 10×10 Octagonal Plate which can only be found on larger sets such as the LEGO Friends Heartlake City Amusement Pier (41375), LEGO Movie 2 Queen Watevra’s ‘So-Not-Evil’ Space Palace (70838), and LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts Clock Tower (75948) to name a few. So a bit of improvising may be needed if you don’t have these parts yet.
As much as I understand the idea of giving shopping incentives and freebies to LEGO fans, I wish that LEGO will eventually make the LEGO Christmas Tree (40338), as well as other previously released seasonal gift-with-purchase (GWP) sets such as the LEGO Christmas Carousel (40293) and LEGO Christmas Gift Box (40292) both from last year, available as regular selling items in LEGO brand stores. In my opinion, it will be nice to offer them initially as exclusive freebies but LEGO will be serving the larger LEGO community in general if they will make these sets available for sale later on.
In the meantime, we have at least their publicly available building instructions to thank for as a service to fans. Don’t forget to check out the upcoming promotional freebies this month such as the exclusive LEGO Creator Mini Gingerbread House (40337) and the free LEGO Star Wars Collectible Obi-Wan Kenobi Minifigure (30624) as featured on the LEGO Store December Calendar.
Happy holiday building everyone!
You can order each piece from Lego for about $40. There are 3 pieces out of stock right now but you can find on other Lego brick sites or change the color of the pieces. 2 of the pieces are not visible once built so a different color will not matter. One piece is for a present so you will need to change the color of one other piece as well. Took me about 40 minutes to go through the list of pieces.