After creating a series of compositions based on my kaleidoscopic patch , I played with Quartz Composer’s particle system, to create a flame and falling snow flakes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsYLevXRytA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FH_-_chcfY

As for the last times, both Flame and Snow source compositions are available. Flame’s patch looks like this:

Quartz Composer flame patch: a Particles patch feeding an image crop, a motion blur and a second crop before reaching the billboard, with a gradient patch off to the side

And here is Snow’s patch preview:

Quartz Composer snow patch: an image-with-string patch cropped and bloomed to make the flake texture, fed into a particle system whose position is driven by an LFO