Grabie Seasons Greetings Happy Holidays Advent Calendar: 24 Days of Art Surprises Reviewed

Introduction

Art advent calendars have exploded in popularity over the last few years, and Grabie is one of the newer brands leading that trend. The Seasons Greetings Happy Holidays Advent Calendar was first released around August or September, and it has a track record of selling out quickly. The brand has built a following with its subscription art boxes, and this 24-door calendar is its seasonal flagship. At $89.99, it sits firmly in the mid-to-upper price bracket for this category, so the real question is whether what is behind the doors justifies the price.

Who This Product Is For

The best advent calendars, in our view, are the ones with actual projects inside rather than loose supplies, and Grabie leans that way with coloring designs, ornaments, and holiday activities. This calendar suits a few distinct types of buyers. If you love discovering new supplies and enjoy variety packs, it is genuinely fun. If you travel light and sketch, the multiple small sketchbooks with thick paper are a real highlight. If you do scrapbooking or paper crafts, the adhesive tools and letter cutouts will feel useful. If you want a cohesive set of painting supplies that all work together, this is not that kind of box.

Inside the Box: The First Third

The early doors set a promising tone. Day one brings oil pastels, which are divisive but popular. Day two includes a small square travel sketchbook with notably thick paper, good for mixed media. Day three features one of Grabie’s brush tip markers, and these are the brand’s standout product: juicy, smooth, and consistently good quality.

Day four is a small festive coloring book, though the pages are quite small and can feel cramped to color. Day five delivers three premium acrylic paints in Vermillion, primary blue, and lemon yellow. Day six contains magnetic mini canvases, a genuinely thoughtful touch since they can go on a fridge or a mini easel. Day seven brings large acrylic paint markers in gold and silver, similar to bullet-nib paint pens. Day eight is the strongest single item: a compact watercolor set. Grabie’s watercolors are well regarded, pigmented, and typically retail around $9.99, making this roughly a tenth of the calendar’s price on its own. Day nine adds three paintbrushes, including a round, a fine detail round, and a number three quill suited to watercolor work.

The Middle Doors: Mixed Results

The middle stretch is where opinions diverge. Day ten adds another thick-paper sketchbook, welcome for travelers and pocket-kit fans. Day eleven introduces clear photopolymer stamps for transferring images onto paper, followed by ink on day twelve. Both are unfamiliar territory for painters, and the box includes no instructions, which is a real gap for anyone new to stamping. Day thirteen and day twenty-two each contain a double-sided dot runner, an adhesive dispenser for scrapbooking that the brand sells separately for $5.99. Two of the same tool in one box feels redundant.

Day fourteen contains cardboard gift labels and holiday ornaments, which feel like filler at this price. Day fifteen brings Christmas-shaped sticky notes, cute but not really an art supply. Day sixteen holds unlabeled colored pencils, and day seventeen offers small wooden ornaments with string, though the colors lean oddly springlike rather than festive. Day eighteen includes cardboard letter cutouts, useful for scrapbooking spells-and-words layouts but underwhelming at $89.99. Day nineteen repeats oil pastels, with packaging that feels cheap and a per-unit price of around $6. Day twenty brings fine-tip acrylic markers, which unfortunately splatter badly under any drag on the paper, a notable weakness compared to the brand’s excellent brush-tip pens. Day twenty-one gives titanium white and ivory black acrylic paints, the two basics. Day twenty-three adds a generous amount of washi tape, genuinely versatile for artists and crafters alike. Day twenty-four closes with a 2025 mini tear-off calendar with a charming pull-away design ending on a Christmas tree illustration.

Putting the Supplies to Work

Using the supplies reveals clear winners and losers. The fine-tip acrylic markers splatter and shoot paint whenever there is drag on the paper, making them frustrating to handle. The bullet-nib gold and silver paint markers perform far better, and the silver in particular is impressively metallic, almost foil-like in appearance. The paper in the sketchbooks holds up to paint pens without soaking through. The watercolors are the star of the box: opaque, pretty, and pleasant to work with, especially paired with the included quill brush. The oil pastels, at least the ones included, are hard to get clean edges from and will not win over skeptics.

One odd omission is green: the box includes essentially only one green across all the paints and markers, which is strange for a holiday-themed set. A white paint pen for highlights would also have been a smart inclusion.

Buying Advice and Final Verdict

Our honest assessment is that this calendar should cost closer to $60 than $90. The value simply is not there door by door, and the mix of painting supplies, stamping tools, and scrapbooking extras makes the box feel scattered rather than curated. A cleaner approach would be one scrapbooking-focused calendar and one painting-focused calendar, so buyers know what they are getting.

The best parts are clear: the watercolors, the brush-tip markers, the travel sketchbooks, and the magnetic mini canvases. The weak spots are the repeated dot runners, the cardboard filler items, and the unreliable fine-tip markers. If you like variety, enjoy surprises, and dabble across painting, scrapbooking, and paper crafts, you will find plenty to like here. If you want depth in one medium, put your budget toward the brand’s watercolors and brush markers individually instead.

Conclusion

The Grabie Seasons Greetings Happy Holidays Advent Calendar is a fun, varied holiday release with a handful of genuinely strong supplies hiding behind some filler doors. It works best for crafters who enjoy mixed supplies and project-style surprises, and it sells out fast, so if it matches your style, move early. Just go in with realistic expectations about the value relative to the $89.99 price tag.