2025 was not a great year for me. I had some major disappointments and suffered from some upsetting things this year. Yet, at this time of my life, I now know that no matter how sad the year has been, there are still some happy things that happen as well.
Since we are so close to the end of 2025, I decided to write a post about the happy things that happened to me this year.
Continue reading “15 of the Happiest Things That Happened for Me in 2025”
After yesterday’s depressing post, I decided to try to write today’s post about more optimistic: I achieved my 2025 reading speed goal!
Yes, I am happy to say I have officially achieved my 2025 reading goal. I didn’t want to set a number of books to read by the end of the year like many online do. Instead, I wanted to increase the speed of my reading. I used to be a fast reader in high school and college, but I’ve slowed down a lot since then. Since the popularity of reading began in 2020, I began to buy books, both new and old, to read. The problem was I was buying them with the mindset that I can read as fast as I used to.
Sadly, that isn’t true. So, now I have way too many books to read and no way to decide if I would like to keep them or not… unless I read them first. This is why I decided to focus my reading goal not on how many books I read in a year, but to work on getting my speed of reading faster.
This year, I can read much faster than I used to. Sometimes, if I have the time, I can read a 300 page book in less than 24 hours. This speed is similar to my reading speed in high school and college. I still notice I need to slow down more that I used to, but I’m not going to complain too much about it.
I have also noticed the work I did on my reading speed has also helped me in other areas of my life. Seeing this has made me feel more confident in my own abilities and gave me hope to start making a dent in my to be read pile of books.
Next year I have some reading goals, but my main goal is just to maintain my reading speed.
That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!
Featured Image is from Pexels.com
It is Christmas Eve, which is a perfect time for families with children to read Christmas themed bedtime stories. Although there are plenty of books about Santa Claus, including The Night Before Christmas, and the birth of Jesus, I wanted to review a book for Blogmas 2025 that didn’t focus on them.
Instead, I decided to focus on a book about a tradition that was honored centuries ago: The Twelve Days of Christmas. Although the celebration is still honored by many, many just know it by the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas. Last year, I found a reprinting of A Little Golden Book that tells the story of the song with illustrations. Since December 24th is the night when the Twelve Days of Christmas begins, I thought it would be a perfect time to review this book.
Continue reading “Book Review: 12 Days of Christmas, A Little Golden Book Classic”
Christmas is this week and I’m sad to say I don’t have a big tree up in my house. I had plans to put one up, but this year things are different. My house needs work and I don’t have anywhere to put a tree up.
Continue reading “The Ups and Downs of Decorating for the Holidays While Working on the House”
Every year, there are new Christmas themed books. Some of them are for adults while others are for children. They tell classic Christmas tales while others tell new and original stories. There are some that are inspired by popular media such as TV shows, movies, and more.
After watching and browsing these books for years, I noticed a major trend for these books. For the past few years, there has been a trend to publish Christmas books inspired by popular media for adults… but these books are meant for children.
One of the books I was curious about was Christmas at Hogwarts. I am not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I was curious about the book. The art looked really nice and the premise peaked my interest. After debating if I would actually like the book, I decided to buy myself a copy and read it myself.
Continue reading “Book Review: Christmas at Hogwarts by J.K. Rowling with Illustrations by Ziyi Gao”
Christmas is less than a week away. I am both happy and sad to see this season to come to an end. I am happy to see this busy season end, but I am also sad because I enjoy Christmas decorations and all the festive activities that go along with it.
This year, I had plans to go to one of the major Christmas events in my town. Even though I had plans, nothing panned out and I ended up staying home. After this miss opportunity, I began to wonder if there are other Christmas events in my area. I began to search for events in my town, but there wasn’t anything as major as the missed event.
Continue reading “Christmas Events in My Town and Missing Out on the Festive Fun for 2025”
Growing up, my relatives read a lot. One of their favorite authors was John Grisham. I grew up knowing John Grisham as an author of mystery novels, which is my relative’s favorite genre of books. When the movie Christmas with the Kranks was released, the news mentioned John Grisham wrote the book it was based off. I was really surprised by this because, like I mentioned, I only knew John Grisham for his mystery novels.
When I got older, I decided to make a list of books I wanted to own and read as a child. Skipping Christmas, the movie Christmas with the Kranks was based off, was on that list. I eventually purchased a copy of it and have read it on and off over the years. After years of reading it, I decided to write a review post about it.
Continue reading “Book Review: Skipping Christmas: A Novel by John Grisham”
It’s about halfway through the month of December so I decided to write an update about how the holiday season is going this year.
So far, nothing exciting has happened. Well, there were exciting things that happened, but it was more related to everyday life and problems with it than the holiday season. As for the holiday side of thing, nothing has happened.
Continue reading “Mid-Holiday Season Update- How the 2025 Christmas Season is Going for Me”
In order to prepare posts for Blogmas 2025, I’ve been watching a lot of romantic Christmas movies. The Hallmark Channel has many Christmas movies to watch, but this year I wanted to try something different: I wanted to watch the romantic Christmas movies that are not from Hallmark.
The first movies I decided to watch is My Christmas Inn. It is from Lifetime and premiere in 2018. This one caught my eye because it stars Tina Mowry-Hardict. I remember watching it a long time ago, but I felt like I forgot about most of it. I found it available other than watch for free on Lifetime’s official YouTube channel in order to review it for this post.
Ever since I was a girl, I loved advent calendars. I usually had the calendars with chocolate in them. Every day in December, I would open a new window, find the chocolate, and eat it. When I had a major health crisis as a teenager, I decided to make myself a bucket list of things I wanted to do before I became to sickly to do them. One of the simplest ones was to buy a chocolate advent calendar for children and eat all the chocolate in one sitting. I ended up doing this years after the health crisis. I did this for only one time, but have no regrets about doing it!
Today, I see many types of advent calendars for sale. Among them are Legos, Disney toy collectables, and other toy brands. I’ve seen advent calendars for adults featuring beauty products, books, and socks. I’ve seen food based advent calendars and ones I just don’t understand who the target audience is, but there it is. There are also advent calendars that are for fans of certain movies and TV shows. These include Harry Potter, Gilmore Girls, and Wicked: For Good. (If you haven’t heard, Wicked: For Good has so many brand deals that it makes sense they would have a tie in advent calendar)
Yet, after browsing all these calendars I realized something: I didn’t see any chocolate advent calendars for children.