IN huge news for all dads who refuse to pick up the phone and call a handiman, Halfords has released its first advent calendar.
Priced at just £30, it includes 40 items from the brand’s Advanced Tool Range, which are all covered by a lifetime guarantee; as the saying goes, “buy well, buy once”.
We got hands on the calendar; carry on reading for our verdict.
Buying a fun gift for a hands-on dad — or any DIY enthusiast, for that matter — can sometimes be difficult; after all, a new saw or spanner doesn’t exactly scream “I love you”.
The Halfords Advent Calendar is an affordable opportunity to buy them something that they’ll use, but that retains a sense of festive cheer.
It fills a bit of a gap in the market; while there are one or two other DIY advent calendars available, there’s nowhere near as much available to tinkerers as there is to beauty fans, coffee addicts or gin lovers.
It walks the line carefully. While it’s a traditional advent calendar with 24 windows, it certainly isn’t ostentatious; in order to preserve the masculinity of the recipient, it’s completely black save some faint grey snowflakes and some flashes of Halfords’ signature orange. At least it means that they can get engine oil on it without ruining it.
Behind each door, you’ll find either some sort of manual tool or an attachment, which together add up to basically the same thing as the Halfords 40 Piece 1/4″ Socket Set, which at the time of writing is on sale for £28 (discounted from £35).
That means that, unlike some beauty advent calendars, this isn’t a great-value calendar that contains hundreds of pounds of goodies; it’s basically a fun, festive way of putting together an existing Halfords Socket Set as if constructing it from Lego.
The top half of the calendar is dominated by the 24th December window, which (spoiler alert!) contains a plastic storage case that will house the tools you open from the 1st to the 23rd.
That means that, for the first 23 days of December, you might end up finding loose sockets around the house. However, there is a nice sense of completion when you fill the box with the previous 23 days’ worth of goodies.
The only other issue we found with the calendar was that many of the tiny windows (specifically the ones that cover the six-point sockets) are surprisingly hard to get into; if you have chunkier fingers, you might find yourself getting frustrated.
However, these are only small gripes, and we think that a petrolhead or DIY-loving dad would love the daily ritual of putting together this socket set.
And as mentioned earlier, Halfords’ lifetime guarantee means that, theoretically, this is a gift they can carry on using for the rest of their lives.
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The Halfords Advent Calendar retails for £29.99, making it extremely well-priced for a non-chocolate advent calendar; after all, we now live in a world where the countdown to Christmas can be accompanied by a box costing the best part of £500 (we’re looking at you, Acqua di Parma).
In fact, even traditional chocolate advent calendars regularly cost more than that these days; at £75, Hotel Chocolat’s Grand Advent Calendar is more than double the price of the Halfords advent calendar.
However, as mentioned above, don’t expect to get hundreds of pounds worth of kit from this calendar. You can actually get everything included in the calendar (apart from the cardboard box) in the Halfords Advanced 40 Piece 1/4″ Socket Set, which costs £1.99 less.
Hiding behind the 24 windows of the Halfords Advent Calendar, you’ll find all the components of a 40-piece socket set, including a hardy plastic case.
It includes:
The market for DIY advent calendars is pretty sparse, but there are a couple of others available.
The most widely-available seems to be the Wera Advent Calendar, which costs £59 and contains “a unique and innovative mix of screwdriving tools and accessories for 25x screw profiles”, according to Amazon.
Other options include the Draper Advent Calendar, which like the Halfords calendar costs £29.99, and the Sealey Advent Calendar, which is currently on sale at Amazon for £37.40.
Unsurprisingly, the Halfords Advent Calendar is only available from Halfords.
It can be shopped either online, or in one of more than 100 stores nationwide.
