Surprisingly there is no simple switch to flick on your iOS device or Mac that auto-adds holidays to the Calendar app. That however doesn’t mean that there isn’t a free and simple solution.

I couple of years ago I actually spent money on an app from the App Store to import calendars to my Calendar app. Granted it was only $0.99, but still, I could be $0.99 richer right now. That being said, I’ve decided to pass on this little tip to all of you, not only to save you a bit of spare change but because a Calendar just isn’t complete until you add the Holidays to it.

 

Finding the Holidays to Add

sync festival to calendar

Subscribe to Holidays

First off, a little explanation on how this works and what’s involved.

Through this process what you’ll be doing is subscribing to an auto-updating list of Holidays. However, your calendar would quickly get cluttered if you added every holiday that is celebrated on this here planet of ours. So we just want to add the Holiday lists that we would actually use.

The subscribable lists are provided by Apple. You can find them here: iCal Calendars from Apple

Once you’ve found the Holiday list you want to add, click the download button. The resulting link that Calendar uses to subscribe will look something like this:

webcal://files.apple.com/calendars/Canadian32Holidays.ics

You don’t really need to worry about this URL/file as it will automatically be picked up by the Calendar app.

 

Subscribe to Holidays on iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod) or Mac OS X

enable holidays Mac calendar

You can be either using a Mac or an iPhone, iPod or iPad.

On a Mac if you click the download link it will open the Calendar app and show a screen like the above. All you need to do to add and sync the list across all your Apple devices is click the “Subscribe” button.

On an iOS device it’s almost the same process. Click the download button and instead of the Calendars app showing up it’ll just pop-up a little message asking if you’d like to subscribe. Just tap the “Subscribe” button.

If you use iCloud to sync your Calendar events across all your Apple devices then there is not need to do this on every device.