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:
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