This was my winning 'Ghosts of Christmas Past' entry. Thank you to everyone who looked and voted! The Ghost of Christmas Past - the most fortunate, perhaps, of all the Spirits to visit the benighted Ebenezer Scrooge! Memory allows us to hold perfect and precious the golden moments of the past, to keep in our hearts those memories to warm us in the years that are darker and colder, to share the joy with the generations who come after. To be the one who looks back across all the years and all the lives, the triumphant march of anticipation, excitement, and contentment... oh, the view must be glorious, indeed! Created in Daz 4.10, 3Delight, with postwork (composition) in Photoshop This image took four days to create - I hadn't planned on entering, but a week in was struck with an idea. I thought I had plenty of time, then, even though it was getting harder to open the file, painfully slow to make changes. I hit render and went away for a three-day holiday... only to return to a render that had managed to get to a whopping 20%! Panicking, I began tearing the layout apart, trying to find what had gone so terribly wrong. A pre-Christmas gift of extra RAM lifted my spirits... only to be dashed again as the work sped up, but the renders remained unutterably slow. A few 'a-ha!' hours later, I made changes, compromises, and slowly rendered layers that I planned (hoped!) to be able to reassemble into a finished piece in Photoshop. It wasn't smooth, or exactly as I planned, but when your imagination outstrips the capacities of your toys, you learn to flex or fail!