Well, the text was in French on this very first Christmas picture. Then, my Dad has modified it to reach for a more international audience, and you can see an up-to-date version each year on his web site (around December).

I still have the original one on my computer at work, with the 2004 text. In November, people usually tell me "It's early to have a Christmas picture as your wallpaper". Then they realize it is neither early nor late. It is just one of my favorite, with the three happy snowmen.

And if you wonder how I have ended up with such a picture, here are some details. The overall design has been drawn on the back of a boring document (unfortunately, I have lost it). Then came the snowman. As usual, I started to draw a few snowmen with a pencil and a paper.

It was then easy to move from this drawings to some pov code. The trees were more difficult to create. I could not figure out a simple way to design them in 3D. There have been many attempts since the beginning of POV-Ray (I started raytracing with DKB, for the rest of you old enough to remember when 32x20 pixels was a big picture on a 286 computer) (Ah! 286 does not mean 286 MHz, as a youngster told me once "Man! 286 MHz! It's so slow"). Some tree generators are even marvelous. But they could not fit in this simple picture.

Back to the pencil, I have wandered along the lines of inspiration, drawing some tiny snowmen. Then, on a sudden, in less than three seconds, the trees loomed. You can see them in the lower right part of the picture below.

In a matter of minutes, I had written a small Octave script (yes, I am the kind of engineer that uses Octave for almost anything). The 'details' were quickly drawn on a third sheet of paper.

I have recently found this old code on my Pentium 166 hard disk drive.  I have given it a try under Freemat, another clone of a commercial software, similar to Octave. The graphical output of the tiny algorithm is displayed below.

The hat has been created using a spline editor, the name of which is SplinEditor 1.2. I cannot find it on the web anymore. It is still buried on the hard disk drive of my Pentium 166.

 Acknoledgments: