This image was inspired, as the contest suggests, by Charles Dicken's " A Christmas Carol ".  This scene would be one that happened in Scrooge's imaginings of a better Christmas to come, after he decides to stop being a miserable person who cares only for money.   

The child, a little girl born to Scrooge, kept poor and living in a cabin, expects that as it had always been, that Santa would not appear on Xmas Eve. So she goes to sleep ( leaving the light on because she is afraid of the dark ). She believes that Christmas Day will come and be as barren as her life has always been. 

However, she is wrong....since the old Scrooge is nowhere to be seen or heard, the future of Christmas gets better, and thus Santa Claus does appear with gifts of love for the little girl.

She will wake up Christmas morning to find presents left just for her.  Her father has lifted the "bah humbug" spell that has made her life so barren and cold all the years she has lived. This Christmas Eve is the beginning of a whole new life filled with love and comfort and even some presents. 

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For this image I used Daz Studio 4.10 pro. I did just a little postwork in Photoshop CC. 

This is the first somewhat complex image that I have taken from Concept to completion in Daz Studio. This is because of how long the render times are using the Iray renderer.  I have a bit of a tugboat of a computer and sometimes it just stalls out on me when rendering with Daz Studio. This is the first image that my computer decided to render well....is that Magic ? Maybe...

It took me about 1+ days to get what I wanted.  I rendered two slightly different versions, each of which took close to 4 hours to render.  So, including the setup and test renders and final renders, I worked on this for a little over a day.

I was pleased to see how well it came out and how little postwork was needed on the final image. I rendered it at 4 times larger than I needed.  That is probably why it took so long to render. 

This is a little present to me from my computer and Santa.  :)

Happy Holidays To All !!