The first of December is here, and while your neighbors may have already overdone it with the Christmas decorations, you might want to join in on the holiday fun. With a few free applications, you can bring the cheer to your desktop with holiday lights, a festive background, and a serene snowfall screen saver.

MacLampsX

MacLampsX places holiday lights around your Desktop. With the Bulb Layout designer, you can choose between five different types of light that can appear on your Desktop -- choose where they will appear and their animation (flash, chase, or steady).

Within the General settings, you can also create and import custom bulb themes that match your particular style. For a how-to on creating bulb themes for MacLampsX, click here. You can also download some pre-designed bulbs here.

X-MasTree

No one can resist a virtual Christmas tree. The X-MasTree application displays a tiny decorated Christmas tree on your Desktop. In the preferences, you can customize the tree to your liking. From choosing the tree size, to color, to the lights and decorations on it. Notice the number at the bottom of the tree? Yup, that’s the days until the holidays begin (you can choose to count-down from December 24, 25, or January 7 in the preferences).

Holiday Scene Desktop Image

No desktop set up would be complete without a nice Desktop image to top it all off. For really great Desktop backgrounds, we turn to Vladstudio.com. We decided to go with the NOEL New Year Wallpaper available on their site.

Snowfall Screen Saver

A holiday tradition around the Mac|Life headquarters includes prominently displaying the Snowfall Screen Saver on our Macs. This screen saver includes a red, ribbon-like backdrop, with snow flakes falling down the screen. In the preferences, you can choose the background color, stripes, speed, snowflake count, and even place a custom image for the screen saver background.

Put it all together and what do you get?

This is our completed setup for the holidays. What do you think? Pretty spiffy, eh? Let us know your favorite Mac holiday tweaks in the comments below.

Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.