An oldie but goodie for the Christmas season

This weekend, I performed in the yearly setting up and lighting of the Christmas tree (I do the lighting, my wife does the decorating). It caused me to recall a little feature that I had nearly forgotten about. This week, I'm going to talk about, not a new feature, but an old feature that perhaps you may just want to make use of this time of year. I'm referring to the Christmas Tree shapes that you can insert into slide shows. Okay, frankly this feature is a bit cheesy, and doesn't fit within the quality standards that we now have for newer features, such as those found in the Christmas Goodies plugin. But it's there, so let's review it for fun.

Below are screen shots of the shapes Christmas Tree with Lights and Christmas Tree with Decor.

The lights and ornaments are randomly arranged each time the trees are rendered. If you're a bit clever about it, you can arrange things so that it appears that the lights are blinking (this feature is actually a version 4 technology so it doesn't support animation directly). You can specify the colors of red, green, yellow and blue as well as the tree color. You can also specify a relative number of lights and ornaments with the options of Few, Many, Lots, or my favorite, Griswald. Then finally you can choose whether you want a tree-topping star or not.

Perhaps next year we'll have a new and improved version of a Christmas tree shape component, so if you're really into the old-school clip-art-like look, then take advantage of it while you can.

Last example, the Christmas tree with Ornaments using the Griswald setting:

(BE123)

Comments:

dlamont

11/28/2007 4:18:47 PM

hahaha, great feature....I love the "Griswald" setting

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Lucas

11/28/2007 6:16:56 PM

Griswald, Ha!

You should see my house in a few days time then, almost puts Clark to shame.

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dreece

11/29/2007 12:43:36 AM

Posted By Lucas on 11/28/2007 6:16 PM
Griswald, Ha!

You should see my house in a few days time then, almost puts Clark to shame.

Well then I sure hope you post a picture for us!

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osborn4

11/29/2007 6:40:56 AM

I've always been somewhat jealous of those that get to go to the beach after opening their Christmas presents.

I've always maintained that my vision of a perfect white Christmas has white sand, not white snow.

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dlamont

12/3/2007 1:20:37 PM

that WOULD be fun to be on the beach right after Christmas, just as long as it was warm haha.

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twj

12/6/2007 7:48:06 AM

I love the Christmas tree and use it every year. Put a wreath around it with chasing lights and "Merry Christmas" above it and it makes a nice Christmas card. Taking the slide duration down to 1 second and putting in multiple copies of the slide makes the lights twinkle quite nicely.

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iamgap

12/26/2007 4:30:26 PM

Our first Christmas here was not a prosperous Christmas, financially. To my wife, just moving here was Christmas, so Christmas 2002 was spent on the Beach at Emerald Isle, NC. It is not white sand, but it is close. IMO, Ft Meyers has the best looking sand that I have seen. As far as warm, it is bouncing between 40s and upper 60s here lately. Yesterday was upper 50s to low 60s. Today the temps have steadily dropped, and right now it is low to mid 40s.

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