Lego Advent: Day 6

Categories Lego Advent

I am lost.

Santa has visited early this year, and has brought a Lego Advent calendar. There are 24 little numbered doors, each containing a dime bag of Legos. There’s a new toy or doodad to build every day, which, in turn, builds anticipation for Christmas.

I will build these and attempt to discern what they are.

December 6: Embarrassed Bellhop with a Pastry

Yeah. Embarrassed bellhop with a pastry. The title says it all. Perhaps too much.

Rating

Fun ★☆☆☆☆

You can take a pastry out of a man’s hand, but painted-on embarrassment is forever.

Ease of Build ★★★★★

He’s an ordinary person just like you or me: he puts his epaulets on one neck stalk at a time.

Comprehensibility ★☆☆☆☆

I can’t even begin.

  1. Is he a bellhop? Who knows. I considered that it might be Royal Tenenbaum, from when he became an elevator operator at the Lindbergh Palace Hotel after having been evicted from it as a tenant, but I looked it up and those uniforms merely have red trim. Is he a doorman? Doormen have nothing to be embarrassed about. A doorman at a big-city fancy hotel is likely to be the coolest customer that you’ll meet on any given day. If you ever need to find a coffee or a place to pee or just want the most genuine and warm version of small talk, ask a doorman. For real. They’re great at their jobs to a shocking degree. This Lego guy is no doorman.
  2. Is that a pastry? I’m not really a dessert aficionado, but I’m assuming that this is something like a jelly doughnut with rainbow sprinkles—the kind without the hole for maximum jelly (Maximum Jelly is also the name of my jazz fusion solo project). It could be a cookie, like the most boring choice in every box of assorted Italian cookies. It could be a personal pan pizza with carrots and celery, which probably exists in California. I’m sticking with “pastry” for now.
  3. Is he embarrassed about the pastry? Was he caught with a literal hand in the cookie jar? That would undermine my pastry hypothesis (Pastry Hypothesis is also the working title of Maximum Jelly’s first greatest hits album). It would be within reason for him to be embarrassed about that soul patch, but that seems too self-aware for this oeuvre.

Extra Parts ☆☆☆☆☆

Epaulets? Epaulets? Are we talking about epaulets? What we have here are an extra set of epaulets and a pastry. I’m going to ask for a pastry and an order of epaulets the next time in a Tim Horton’s drive-thru in rural Québec and see what happens. I assume they either give you a box of Timbits and curse you out in ancien français or a moose taps you on the shoulders with a loon and you become an Honorary Knight of the RCMP.

Overall ★☆☆☆☆

I will admit that this may be an unfair evaluation. When I was young, every year I would sit down and carefully write out my Christmas list. “Please Santa, bring me an embarrassed bellhop with a pastry.” It was similar the following year. “Dear Santa, I’ve been a good boy and it seriously wasn’t my fault when that crayon went through the dryer. Can you please bring me an embarrassed bellhop with a pastry?” By the time 1980 arrived in the Pine Barrens in approximately 1984, it was, “Yo Santa. My name’s Chip and I’m here to say: please bring me an embarrassed bellhop with a pas-ter-ay.” The video games and cable-knit sweaters piled up, but I never got the one thing I yearned for, the one thing that represented the full range of human emotions from embarrassment to moving luggage to having a sweet tooth: an embarrassed bellhop with a pastry. Now I am too lost in the ennui to appreciate it (“Lost in the Ennui” is also the 22-minute opus on Side B of Maximum Jelly’s Pastry Hypothesis.)

"Prepare to fend off the bridge abutment."

2 thoughts on “Lego Advent: Day 6

  1. Chip,
    You are hilarious! I’m loving your Advent series – a pleasant diversion in this non-sailing season. You are a very creative writer.

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