Android: Tabbed Layout or Android Tabs without having an Action Bar?

So I created my app to have tabs on the action bar which direct to three fragment windows. I decided to change the theme of the app to "@android:style/Theme.Holo.Light.NoActionBar.Fullscreen" and suddenely my app started crashing with a nullpointer exception. After sometime I realized that the theme change, which disabled the action bar might have caused this.

Is there a way to implement tabbed layout without an action bar? A custom action bar? I badly want to use that theme. OR is there a way to customize the action bar: change the color or add custom icons and search function to make it more visually appealing?

Thank you!