Tirol Christmas House and Cup (product information)

All images are from Tirol's web site. 

Tis the season to buy disposable Christmas decorations, and Tirol has a real cute one for those who are good with their hands. If you buy one of their boxes with multiple candies, you can assemble it into a two-story house with Christmas tree, fireplace, and Santa sneaking out after leaving huge gift-wrapped chocolates (half the size of your tree) to enjoy on Christmas day.

For the time being, you can watch a video showing you how to manipulate the box on Tirol's web site. Since the video is on the home page, there's every chance it'll vanish shortly after Christmas when it will be replaced. I'm not sure what they'll replace it with, but if it follows a new year's theme, it'll be a tiny apartment in which a family is gathered around the table eating sembei and soba while watching the New Year's song contest. 

The chocolate "presents" are premium versions (larger chocolates with more layers of varied candy) strawberry shortcake, chocolate gateau, and cheesecake flavors. All in all, a pretty uninspiring collection of flavors as the first and last are likely to taste pretty bad if my experiences with such things are telling. I'd be especially frightened of the horribleness of the cheesecake flavor as it's likely to taste of the pungent flavors of Gouda or cheddar rather than cream cheese. 

In addition to this holiday offering, there is a Christmas cup with regular (smaller, less sophisticated chocolates). It's far less inspiring on the flavor front, but contains a lot of "safer" bets like the "biscuit", almond, and coffee chocolates which are part of most mixes which are not premium. The Christmas flavors (shown in the lower left in the picture above) are kinako mochi and a white chocolate version of the standard milk chocolate biscuit (which is just chocolate around a bland little bit of cookie). 

The boxed specialty Tirol options usually show up at Japanese markets in California sooner or later, though this one may not since it has a time limit based on the holiday theme. They're also very overpriced with most boxes of 10 candies costing around $10. Considering such boxes cost 200-300 yen ($2.37-$3.60)  in Japan, this is a pretty hefty mark-up, even for an import. I might buy this in Japan to review the flavors (even though I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like two of them), but I almost certainly wouldn't buy it here at a place like Nijiya. 

It's a little late in the game, but you can get a cute wallpaper with a Christmas illustration for the time being. It'll change as soon as the month ends, but you can grab a new one for the next month when this one goes away.

As a little reminder to readers who may have missed it, or to those who haven't gotten around to entering, I'm offering a box of the current Tokyo regional KitKats (rum raisin) as a contest prize. You can read about it and enter here. The contest ends on Christmas day 2012, so enter early, but only once, please. Also, please remember that comments are moderated so there is a delay between your making the comment and it being posted. Many people are submitting comments two or three times because they are not showing up immediately. Rest assured that your comment will be posted and it is not necessary to submit multiple times.