We can almost glimpse the end of this year’s holiday rush, but we're not quite through the cooking, eating, family events, and other traditions, mostly eating. Armed with an iPhone or iPod touch, this guide of 14 apps--plus a few extras--will see you through the holidays. Watch New Year’s fireworks, or create your own. Make a dinner reservation, or find the perfect recipe. Take a group photo, stream holiday music, send thank-you e-cards, and more. We're not quite sure when the “holiday season” ends--Superbowl Sunday? Valentine’s Day?--but you'll keep using most of these apps even longer.

Holiday
We rarely keep track of important days, and we usually only identify upcoming holidays by the current ad campaigns. Oh, time to buy something for Father's day again? Thanks, TV! So Holiday makes us feel organized again, listing all of the big calendar events for dozens of countries. Just tap a few countries to make selections, and see what comes up. It even counts down the days until the event, nudging us to plan better this year. If not, we'll be early for next year.

FlyCast
If you must spend money on holiday music, skim Amazon's daily MP3 download deals to save. But really, do you want to buy something that's going to get stale the second time you hear it? Dodge the bill with the free Internet radio streamer, FlyCast. Sure, you can listen to any station, which is good for clearing the mind if the family gets overwhelming. But you can tap into holiday-themed streams, too. Our favorite: SOMA FM’s groove Christmas mix.

Christmas Tree Decorator
We've known that Christmas trees are dangerous ever since seeing that one episode of Mythbusters. So we're relieved to replace our trees with the sterile, perfect beauty of this iPhone app. You can decorate, break ornaments, add presents, and even swap backgrounds. It doesn't have that terrible, pine smell or any needles to clean up. Best of all, our houses won't burn down this year. Now, what was that about a power adapter recall?

Backgrounds
While you can find your own wallpaper image with a search in Safari, Backgrounds presents many picture categories without that hassle. The free app includes holiday-related themes, pulled from sources online. You just find something you like, save it, and set it as the background within the Photos app. And since Backgrounds isn't tailored to a specific holiday, once you put the tree in the trash and, ummm, melt down the menorah, you can swap in something new.

TinyKitchen Cookbook
Search or browse 70,000 recipes from RecipeSource.com, and import them into this iPhone cookbook. A simple shopping list adds all the needed ingredients to a list and can then email you the results. And while we couldn't manually add our family secrets, the vast database gives us all kinds of delicious foods. You can even automatically multiply or decrease the serving size for bigger or smaller groups. Or for completely manual recipe management, we also like Evernote. This do-it-all note program can read text from photos for quick searches, even hand-written recipes from grandma.

Timers
Keep track of the oven, slow cooker, stove, and brining all at once. (Brining: It’s both fun to say and delicious to eat.) This simple timer lets you input multiple event names, set countdowns for as much as 99 hours, and let everything run together. Best of all, Timers works even if the phone is turned off, although you'll have to open the app again to hear the alarm. And instead of just cooking, we're timing all sorts of things. How long since the nephews stopped crying? When does the family leaves? What's remaining number of days to return unwanted gifts?

OpenTable
Track down local restaurants, read concise reviews, and make reservations from this single app. You could score a table on New Year's or figure out if your local Chinese restaurant is open on Christmas. Maps even help direct you to the destination. OpenTable is great for last-minute plans out, and we like pairing it with Now Playing to complete the evening.