Many moons ago, WordPress.com would allow us to give our blogs a festive mood around the holiday seasons by enabling a falling snow effect. Having never seen snowfall in person back then, I would rush to enable it on my blog to give it a chilly vibe.
Imagine my surprise when I found out a team within Automattic had been working to bring back the coveted snowfall this season!
As announced yesterday, all WordPress.com-hosted blogs can enable snowfall from the settings page. Visit the blog afterwards, and you will be greeted with the enchanting sights of falling snow that also reacts to your cursor movement.
I’ve enabled it on this blog, and you should be able to see it in darker areas of the screen, like on the picture below!
Why snow? What’s the point?
As is often the case, you can’t always post something on the internet and expect not to have to defend it. As I recall, some people wondered why I had Christmas festivities on my blog since I wasn’t a Christian. I’m sure people will ask that again, so here goes:
The snowfall effect may remind people in the Western Hemisphere of Christmas and the holiday season, but it’s not just an exclusive natural event reserved for Christmas. Toward the end of the year, real-world temperatures tend to drop in many parts of the world, ushering in an abundance of falling snow!
In fact, just last year, I experienced heavy snowfall in Munich. The city was blanketed under such a thick layer of snow that flights and train operations had been suspended for hours. I had seen snow before, but never to such an extreme extent.
I’m not oblivious to the fact that snowfall brings its own set of problems to daily life. I had a tough time getting snow off my rental BMW X5 one winter in Colorado. However, even those who grew up experiencing snowfall every winter tend to enjoy its arrival when the first snow falls.
I don’t live in a snowy climate. In fact, Bangladesh never sees any snowfall. But the temperature begins to drop significantly in December (it’s already pretty chilly today!). Adding a snowfall effect to my blog coincides with the real-world effect of arguably the most popular season in this country.
How to turn on snowfall on WordPress sites
If your site is hosted on WordPress.com, you can simply head over to the Settings page and toggle Enable Snow. The falling snow effect will be running for a few days into January or until you turn the setting off.
For all other self-hosted WordPress sites, including WordPress.com sites with plugin access, you can choose from a myriad of plugins available at WordPress.org to add a touch of falling snow effect with the added benefit of letting it snow on your blog for as long as you want!
If you love snow as much as I do, go ahead and let it snow!
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