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Holiday Backgrounds

Show a photo on a holiday or special day, from Settings → General → Holiday Backgrounds. By default it's a soft background behind just that day's own cell (a Week view day column, a Month view cell, or a Planner day); check "Expand to full screen" on an entry to have it take over the whole card's background instead, for just that day, the whole week, or the whole month.

Built-in holidays​

Toggle on any of the built-in dates (New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, 4th of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) and upload your own photo for it (these are dates only; no image ships bundled with any of them). Easter and Thanksgiving are computed fresh each year (the actual Sunday/4th-Thursday), not a fixed month/day, so they land correctly every year with no maintenance. Any built-in holiday can be renamed from Settings too.

Custom dates​

Use + Add custom date for anything the built-in list doesn't cover: a birthday, an anniversary, a family tradition, a one-off event. Each custom entry gets its own uploaded photo and name, and can be either:

  • Recurring: the same month/day every year, like the built-ins, or
  • A specific one-time year: shows only for that exact date once, never recurring.

Every entry (built-in or custom) can independently be set to the small per-day background or the full-screen takeover, and the full-screen ones each pick their own scope: day, week, or month.

When more than one holiday wants the screen​

It's possible for two enabled, full-screen holidays to both want the card on the same day: a month-long custom background overlapping a single-day built-in one, for instance. Family Hub resolves that automatically:

  1. The narrower scope wins: a single day beats a week, a week beats a month. The idea is that checking "month" for one background and "day" for another almost always means "show the month backdrop generally, but let the specific day take over on its own day."
  2. Still tied (same scope)? Whichever entry's own date is closest to today (or, if you've navigated away from today, closest to whatever range is currently on screen) wins: the more "currently relevant" one.
  3. Still tied? Falls back to list order: built-in holidays before custom ones, then whichever was added first.

A day-scope background only ever takes over on its exact real-world date, even while browsing a Month view that spans the whole month around it, so simply looking at a month a holiday falls in doesn't accidentally trigger its full-screen takeover early.

Readability over the photo​

Family Hub automatically samples each uploaded photo's average brightness and switches day names/numbers to white text when the photo is dark enough to need it. That way a dark holiday photo doesn't swallow the date numbers and headers along with it. Nothing to configure; it just adapts to whatever you upload.