Festivitas lets you decorate your Apple devices with holiday lights and snowflakes

If you want to bring a little holiday cheer to the screen you use most, you’ll enjoy the newly updated Festivitas app for Apple devices. Originally designed to add holiday lights to your Mac desktop, this popular standalone app has been updated this year with several new features, most notably the release of the app that brings its twinkling, colorful lights to iOS devices for the first time.

With the new Festivitas app for iPhone and iPad, you can add and customize a string of holiday lights on your device’s home screen using iOS widgets. The lights can frame your favorite personal photo (or maybe a vacation photo you dig on Pinterest), and you can choose to make the fixture transparent so it blends in with your background.

Although seasonal apps can sometimes be low-quality money grabs, developer Simon Støvring puts real effort and thought into the design of Festivitas — and he doesn’t charge anything, either. Alternatively, the app is available free to consumers, with premium features that can be unlocked for a fair price of between $3.99 and $9.99. (You can choose the price that suits you.)

On both macOS and iOS, you can customize your holiday lights in multiple ways, beyond choosing their colors and blinking pattern. You can adjust the cable thickness, width, and height, choose from preset color palettes like Candy Cane, Winter Snow, Elf, and more, or you can design your own.

You can also make more precise adjustments to things like color tone or temperature, flash speed, and spacing between lights.

Another bonus is that you’ll be able to use the lights again outside of the winter holidays, as you can now change the shape of the lamp to designs like bat, clover, Easter egg, heart, ghost, star, “2026,” and more throughout the year. This lets you continue to enjoy the app on holidays and other special occasions — there’s even a “WWDC” bulb to celebrate Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Another new feature this year is the Mac app’s Snow Effect, which adds floating snowflakes to your desktop. You can customize this experience, letting the flakes gently drift down toward your sidewalk, or increasing the amount of snow, falling speed, flake size, and wind, turning it into a blizzard-like affair. You can also choose to have snow fall over everything on your screen, or just on the desktop itself.

Both the snow and lights can interact with your mouse as you move it across the screen, either expelling snow or raising and dropping the lights, for a bit of interactive fun. Additionally, moving the lights to the top makes it easier to see your browser tabs when you need to click on them, although you can turn this feature off if you prefer.

If you’re more technically inclined, you’ll appreciate the app’s shortcut integration that lets you automate when the lights and snow come on. This allows you to do things like turn on snow based on the day’s forecast, have lights appear alongside your music, and more.

There are plenty of other apps that offer holiday themes, widgets, and icons for your iPhone, but there’s a whimsy in Festivitas that makes it worth a download for anyone interested in home screen or desktop customization.