holiday theme

A  holiday theme  is a temporary custom CSS or other change in a website typically meant to visually indicate the celebration of a holiday or special occasion.

Why
A holiday theme is a way of celebrating the holidays that you care about. Similar to how people hang up special decorations for particular holidays, some like to decorate their digital home with a temporary theme.

IndieWeb Gift Calendar
Looking for the latest seasonal end of year IndieWeb Gift Calendar? See:
 * IndieWeb Gift Calendar

How
A holiday theme may include:


 * Changes to the styles of a website (such as a colored background)
 * An announcement banner informing people of a special occasion

Chris Aldrich

 * has previously made small changes to background elements to indicate the celebration of particular holidays
 * Christmas 2016 - added an "Ugly Sweater" background to the typically black frame around his page as well as a snow-effect (via JetPack) for the month of December to celebrate the end of year holidays.
 * christmas sweater.PNG

Aaron Parecki
celebrates a few holidays on his website:
 * 🎂 The home page shows animated balloons on his birthday since 2016
 * 🎃 pixel grid turns orange and black, and the background map changes to orange theme during the month of Halloween

Eddie Hinkle

 * added confetti that drops on a timer on eddiehinkle.com on New Years Eve, New Years Day and January 2nd.
 * eddiehinkle-newyears.gif


 * He also supports weather effects as a theme as of 2018-11-15

capjamesg
has made a few holiday updates to his site:


 * Added a banner to his website that displays his birthday on his website. The countdown was manually updated three days in advance of his birthday.


 * Celebrated Halloween by adding a spooky banner and changing the emoji in his blog's name to a pumpkin (since Halloween 2021)


 * On November 27th, 2021, in anticipation of December, updated his website to use a Christmas theme, pictured below:
 * holiday theme.png

Anthony Ciccarello
added a red and green color theme and animated snowflakes to his website in December 2021 & 2022
 * Snow animation is using a library called snowfall.js
 * ciccarello dot me christmas theme.png

WordPress

 * WordPress.com has previously enabled an option to allow virtual snow to fall as an overlay on user's pages
 * JetPack has an extension for WordPress.org self-hosted sites to do this
 * There are also a variety of plugins that allow this type of funcitonality as well.

Github

 * 🎃 Since about 2017, GitHub changed the colors of their standard contributions calendar visualization from green to shades of yellow, oranges, and black to celebrate Halloween

Facebook

 * Customization for birthday celebrations
 * need examples

Google

 * Has previously done custom overlays on pages in celebration of their birthdays
 * need examples

Twitter

 * 🎃 For Halloween, users will often change their display name to a play on spooky words often along with emoji including pumpkins, ghosts, spiders, webs, or other holiday related emoji. See Halloween for more details.
 * Some users will do a similar play on their names and emojis for Christmas as well
 * examples requested

Letterboxd

 * 🎃 For Halloween, Letterboxd changed their three circle logo to give each circle a scary, ghostish face and animate it to appear as if it was slowly dripping blood. See Halloween for more details.

Highlighting colors
Inspired by the CSS-based counter display at https://www.pinknews.co.uk/ one could implement highlighting colors for either personal branding or for holiday decoration. It has a clever little hack such that when you highlight across multiple paragraphs it gives each paragraph a different color for a rainbow effect.



It's done with a set of styles like: p:nth-child(6n+5)::selection { background-color: blue }

Basically, for every  element in the main body of text it just cycles through 5 or 6 possible background colours, using the ::selection pseudo selector (?) to only appear when highlighted and nth-child to target each paragraph differently.

Ideas:
 * Pastel colors for Spring/Easter
 * Red, white and blue for Fourth of July?
 * Orange/black for Halloween?
 * red/white for candy canes or Red/Green in December

This could also be used to spice up one's fragmentioner as well.