The annual “Christmas tree” is getting to be something of a tradition at theLogBook; basically, it’s a “best of” collection of that year’s Toybox toy reviews and pictorials, all gathered under the tree. As they should be. It’s a very crudely programmed graphical menu that doesn’t really give you any explicit instructions - what you click on is (God and HTML willing) what you’ll see.

In 2006, I assembled the tree and its attendant presents in Paint Shop Pro, as much out of laziness as anything. But this year, I decided to take a different route - I had all of the stuff readily at hand, and one morning I had a little bit of time, so I physically assembled all of this year’s Toybox items - most of them in their original boxes no less! - in one place and took a photo. Compared to last year’s - and a work-in-progress version for this year which was wiped out in a power bump - that’s almost cheating. But I thought it’d be a real statement of geeky cool to actually have all that stuff in one place at one time.

One cheat I’ll admit to: the Voyager and other space probe models were simply too small and spindly to be seen, so I propped up the relevant patches for their missions instead. Also lost in the shuffle may be VINCENT from The Black Hole. See if you can find him - he’s there for a reason. Also a bit sneaky is the dark red gift at the lower right corner - with a Starfleet combadge on it. This is there to visualize something for which there wasn’t a physical package…well, unless I went and found an old 3/4″ broadcast videotape from the ’80s somewhere. This was a bit easier.

If anything was wrong with my first draft of this year’s tree, it was that there was simply not enough going on among the tree’s ornaments themselves. Last year’s tree had a couple of things snuck in among the ornaments, so literally two days out, I added a couple of extra goodies - namely, the baby and Jet Jaguar (!). If these look like cheesily-pasted-on late additions…that’s because they were!

Anyway, hopefully everyone enjoyed this year’s tree. Now that I’ve got a kid who, in theory, should be taking up almost all of the household toy-buying budget instead of his dad, I’m not sure how the tree idea will play out in the future. But then again…I’ve still got a few trinkets here and there that I’ve been holding back on.