Festivitas for Mac: Holiday Lights for Your Dock and Menu Bar, Explained
What Festivitas does
Festivitas is a macOS app by indie developer Simon Støvring that hangs animated string lights from your menu bar and dock. No productivity angle, no calendar integration, nothing serious. You launch it, the lights appear, and you start tweaking. The app first shipped in December 2024, got wide coverage from Mac-focused press, and then the 2025 update expanded it substantially — adding snow effects, interactive cursor reactions, and iPhone and iPad widget support.
“Festivitas 2.0” or the 2025 release is what most people are running now, and it’s a meaningfully different experience from the original launch version.
How the customization works
This is where the app earns more than a first glance. Settings for the menu bar and the dock are completely independent — you can run a different look on each. Each area has its own controls for cable thickness, light size, bulb spacing, and overall opacity. There’s quite a bit of surface area here once you open the preferences panel.
Animation modes
Three main patterns ship with the app. Twinkle does gentle random sparkles. Wave sends a pulse from one end to the other. Chase makes lights race across in sequence. Each has a speed slider. Short sentence: they all look good.
Bulb styles
The shape library goes well past the standard round globe. The 2025 version carries over fifteen styles: snowflakes, stars, hearts, bats, clovers, ghosts, beer mugs, cocktail glasses, and a handful of novelty shapes including ones labeled “2026” and “WWDC.” Color control works per-light, and preset palettes — Candy Cane, Winter Snow — sit alongside a custom color picker if you want to go further.
The cursor interaction
Most users miss this on first install: the lights respond to your cursor. You can nudge them and they bounce slightly before settling back. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that makes the app feel considered rather than assembled in an afternoon.
New in 2025: snow, iPhone, iPad
The 2025 update added a virtual snowstorm to the Mac version. Snow falls across the screen with a pointer-avoidance sensitivity control, so flakes steer clear of wherever you’re pointing if you want them to. Once you dial it in, it’s surprisingly livable alongside actual work.
iPhone and iPad support arrived as animated widgets. Small, medium, and large sizes are available, along with photo-framing widgets that put twinkling lights around lock screen images. There’s also a transparent widget variant that overlays on existing home screen elements rather than replacing them.
One thing to know before you install
Festivitas needs accessibility permissions on first launch. It uses them to locate the dock so it knows where to anchor the lights. macOS will prompt you, and nothing shows up until you grant access. This trips people up — it’s a legitimate technical requirement, not a permissions red flag, but it’s worth knowing going in so you’re not sitting there wondering why nothing happened.
Pricing and system requirements
The Mac version uses a pay-what-you-want model, with a price range of roughly $3.99 to $9.99, purchased through the developer’s own site. On iOS and iPadOS, it’s a free download with comparable in-app purchase options at similar price points.
macOS 14.6 (Sonoma) or later is required. Older versions of macOS are not supported.