1999.12: You decorate your home for the holidays, so why not decorate your Mac, too? No, I’m not suggesting you put Christmas lights all over your computer, but instead use software to do it.

First, Tiger Software has a program called Holiday Lights 5.0. It lets you put virtual Christmas lights (or Menorahs, or Turkeys, or little happy faces) around your monitor.

Also, it lets you create a screen saver that you can customize to fit almost any holiday (like Hanukkah, Christmas, or my birthday!). And, as an added bonus, it lets you pick a holiday-oriented song to play in the background – and it will display a text message.

A quick tip for users of the unregistered version of Holiday lights: This program will only let you use five of the songs that comes with it in the screen saver. However, you can work around this by deleting all of the music you don’t want to use. (You can delete them in the “Music Files” folder.) This way you can play a grayed-out song.

Another nice program is called Snow made by Dave Warker. I bet you can guess what it does. Yep, it puts snow on your desktop. Also, it has a rather large collection of music files you can play along with the snow flakes.

Lastly, no computer is completely decorated for the holiday without desktop pictures. There are plenty of desktop pics on the net. The Holiday Spot has all of the desktop pictures you’ll need, for both Christmas and Hanukkah, plus other holidays.

Now, these tips might make your co-workers and family members think you’re a little too obsessed with the holidays or your Mac, but at least you’ll be ready for the holidays.

Update: Holiday Lights and Snow have been discontinued but continue to be available for download. Holiday Lights works with Mac OS 7.x through 9.2.2. Snow 2.2 supports 680×0 Macs running System 6 or 7.x; version 2.4 requires a PowerPC Mac and Mac OS 7.x through 9.2.2.

keywords: #holidaydecorations