Adding a theme to your carnival doesn’t have to be difficult.  It can be as easy as looking around you and searching Wikipedia.

Interspersing a few interesting facts about a timely topic, regardless of whether that topic is closely tied to the particular blog carnival, dresses it up substantially.  It’s way better than a bare list of links.

Here’s how I’ve done it:

• Choose the topic.  Around this past Independence Day I did an American Flag themed Carnival of Personal Finance.
• Go to Wikipedia.  This is often a great place to get general-interest information on a particular topic.  This topic was no exception.
• Read the entry and pick out four or five somewhat connected pieces of information.  Write a few sentences on each piece of information.  (Don’t just cut and paste from the article!)
• If there are images available, great!  If they’re public domain, even better.  That’s how the flags were.  I uploaded them to my server.
• Break up the posts with the themed pieces.  This makes the carnival read a bit more like a story, for a fraction of the effort that it would take to write the entire carnival in story format.
• As an added touch, tie in the theme of the carnival to the e-mail you send to the participating blogs.

Themeing your carnival this way is a low-cost way to get a fair bit more buzz.