A string of lights for every festival
Every clip below is recorded straight from the app.
Change it from the menu bar
Click the lights icon in the menu bar to switch theme, lamp shape and effect in one click.
- 16 themes and 17 lamp shapes
- Steady, Glow, Twinkle, Chase and Flicker effects
- Settings for string length, number of lamps, sag, size and speed, with a live preview
Made to stay out of your way
Festive, without slowing you down.
17 lamp shapes
Classic bulbs, globes, Chinese lanterns, stars, snowflakes and hearts; pumpkins, ghosts, bats and candy corn; plus seven fruits.
A holiday calendar
16 themes, from Halloween and Christmas to Lunar New Year, Diwali and Hanukkah. The lights change for each holiday by themselves, then go back to your own look.
Gentle animation
Lamps sway softly on the wire. Animations pause when Reduce Motion is on.
Any display
Show the lights on your main screen, a particular one, or all of them. Keep them above or behind your windows. Switch them from Shortcuts or Siri.
Light on resources
Drawn with Core Animation, so it uses almost no CPU. Clicks pass straight through the lights to the apps below.
Always up to date
New shapes and themes arrive through built-in updates. Signed and notarized by Apple.
Install in a minute
No account, no setup.
- Open the downloaded disk image and drag Festival Lights into Applications.
- Launch it from Applications. The app lives in the menu bar, so there’s no Dock icon.
- Click the lights icon in the menu bar to switch themes, shapes and effects, or open Settings for more options.
Festival Lights is a Mac app. Send yourself the link and grab it on your Mac.
Free · macOS 14.0 or later · Apple silicon and Intel · English and Chinese
Festival Lights is free, and it stays free. If it brightens your desk, you can buy me a coffee. It helps pay for new themes.
Buy me a coffeeQuestions
Is it really free?
Yes. Every theme, shape and effect is free, with no ads and no account. If you’d like to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee.
Will it slow down my Mac?
No. The lights are drawn once and animated by Core Animation, the same system macOS uses for its own effects, so the app uses almost no CPU.
Do the lights get in the way?
Clicks pass straight through them to whatever is underneath. You can also put them behind your windows so they only decorate the desktop, or hide them from the menu bar.
Does it work with multiple displays?
Yes. Show the lights on your main display, a particular one, or all of them.
What does it collect?
Nothing about you. The app sends an anonymous launch count with a random ID, the app and macOS versions and your language, which tells us how many Macs run it. Turn it off in Settings → Share anonymous usage. This site counts visits without cookies that track you across sites and doesn’t store IP addresses.
How do I uninstall it?
Choose Quit from its menu bar panel, then drag Festival Lights from Applications to the Trash.