Cubing advent calendars aren't necessarily a new thing, a few other stores have offered them in previous years but at the start of October, I got an email about whether I had any plans to make one too, I also saw a facebook post on the UK Cube Association Parent Community, it became clear to me that there was some demand for one this year from a UK based cube store.

But the question remained: How could I actually make a cubing advent calendar? It couldn't be too intricate, I have never been good at art and design stuff, I wanted it to look decent and be interesting. Creating a separate door for every day would be very complicated and take a lot of work, I also wanted to avoid using too much stuff specifically bought for this project, if I could reuse cardboard from boxes I have received then that would be brilliant.

Then I had an idea - Why not repurpose the mystery puzzles boxes? For years, I have had a mystery puzzles box at competitions, the box contains a load of random non-WCA puzzles and cubers will pay £5 to take one out of the box, the mystery puzzles box design has gone through various iterations over the years as I looked for ways to improve it so it could handle more people pulling puzzles out of it without breaking. 

Initially, my mystery puzzles box was literally just a box with a hole in it, you could easily peak inside and see what is in there, then I had the idea of putting some foam at the top of the box and cutting lines across the hole so you could put your hand through the foam and take a puzzle out without seeing inside. The issue with this was that the foam would quickly get damaged and come out, tape wasn't strong enough.

Then one day, I got a piece of string and tried to thread it through, I tied the string to the end of the pencil and used the pencil to poke holes through the box, in and out to secure the foam at the right position at the top of the box. This did the job but was quite tedious. Then one day, I realised that what I was doing was literally sewing, just a very inefficient form of it. I then bought a very cheap and basic sewing kit and started actually sewing the foam to the top of the box, this made the box even more durable.

For the mystery advent box, I have repurposed the mystery puzzles boxes, replacing the foam and wrapping it up in Christmas wrapping, the boxes will be loaded with 24 unique non-WCA puzzles and should arrive before the start of advent.

The annoying thing about all this is that I need very specific sizes of foam and boxes and I really don't want to have to search online to buy those specific sizes, the box is the one used by MoYu for batches of 60 RS3M 2020s (or other similarly sized cube boxes) and the foam is used to protect the Gan Mosaic Kits when they are shipped in boxes of 6 from China. If the idea is really popular then I may have to look for other solutions but we shall see.