December is here, meaning Christmas and the Holidays are just around the corner. This is the time when many website owners get the urge to "decorate" their sites for the Holidays. Marketing strategy also supports the notion of setting the Holiday mood on your website, especially if you are selling potential Holiday gifts from your site! Here are a few suggestions for finding free decorating tools to make the effort both fun and worthwhile.

Add PowerPoint Christmas Cards

Powerpoint Christmas Cards are easy to make (especially using one of these wonderful backgrounds) and mount on your website to welcome your site guests in festive style!

Presentation Helper- offers free festive Powerpoint backgrounds and instructions on how to send PowerPoint Christmas Cards to your near and dear. They also offer a free Online Christmas Card Maker that can be used to email cards to your loved ones.

WonderShare also offers some lovely PowerPoint Christmas and Holiday backgrounds with particular emphasis on Business Holiday greetings. They even provide a video to guide you in how to create a Holiday slideshow, and upload it to YouTube. You can then either show it to people on YouTube, or embed the code onto your own site to share with your visitors.

Phillip Martin also offers some elegant Christmas templates for Powerpoint in a wide assortment of colors and images. For instance, the Bell template shown to the right comes in blue, brown, green, gray, orange, pink, purple, red, white, or yellow! Phillip also offers free matching Holiday clipart to help you customize your PowerPoint creations!

Create a Christmas Site or Page Theme

FGClipartBorders offers free Holiday website border backgrounds with a variety of themes, including trees, greetings, Holly, Santa, Pixies, Lights, Gingerbread Men, Candy Cane, and Snowmen.

SantaLady offers some beautiful Victorian Holiday clipart featuring St Nick, children, holly, nutcrackers, angels and ornaments to spruce up your website, emails, or e-cards.

SnoVille features sweet homespun country Holiday background and clipart sets for websites that bring back thoughts of Christmas from yesteryear....calico, quilting, and gingham like patterns that will enrich your site in a downhome sort of way.

Wonder Backgrounds offer five pages of really beautiful, professional quality website backgrounds in a variety of Holiday colors and themes. These backgrounds are intended primarily as backgrounds for MySpace webpages, but could be custom used by experienced web designers on other types of websites as well (with a link of course). CSS coding is provided for proper embedding.

PhotoShop Star provides a really wonderful tutorial on how to create a gorgeous Christmas site template in Photoshop in a few hours. This tutorial is intended for those who have good working knowledge of Photoshop.