Abstract Thursday - "Christmas Vortex"

I thought I'd try a technique I saw recently in a photo magazine, using a circle of black paper as an occluder for the camera lens and cutting a small hole in it of a particular shape. The idea is to produce a specific sort of bokeh. As it's Christmas I cut a 5-pointed star about 1 cm across in the occluder then photographed the lights on the Christmas tree.

However I was disappointed with the initial result as it was really rather boring. So I twisted it in Photoshop using Polar Coordinates and then superimposed a duplicate of the image 3 more times (blending mode "Lighten"), rotating each one 90 degrees from the previous one. With a bit more tweaking it turned out like a vortex, which I thought was a bit more interesting.

So it's an abstract with a Christmas theme :)

Thanks as always to youoregon1 for hosting this challenge - and Merry Christmas to everyone!