Month: December 2025

New Years Eve Traditions

~ SA Otey

In comparison to Halloween, New Year’s is my next least favorite holiday. New Year’s Eve television is more painful to watch than the Superbowl halftime show. Every year the debauchery and hedonism is cranked up another notch as the desensitizing of our culture continues down the slippery slope of depravity.

We make a bunch of snacks as the last hurrah for the diet that starts the next day. Or maybe we move the new diet to January 2nd, you know, leftovers. We stay up late to watch people grind each other on television while we listen to the horrific noises that pass for music that’s shoved in our ear canals for the hour leading up to the ball drop. Ball drops, people kiss, sing the same song every year, then go to bed.

New Year is just another day, there is nothing magical about January 1st. Don’t make promises to yourself that you can’t keep. If you want to change, change now or six months from now. Just make up your mind that you want to do it.

Best way to store all your digital photos.

~ SA Otey

Seems like everywhere you go during the year you take a thousand pictures of whatever place you visit. It used to be that only a few people had a camera and now everyone has a camera on their phone. How do you manage all those photos? Do you delete bad ones? Did you get them printed? Do you wait until your hard drive fills up and crashes so that you lose all of your memories? I say lose your memories because you were too busy fiddling with your phone rather than actually enjoying the event you attended.

Here’s my process and I keep it pretty simple. For the DSLR  I download pictures to my Macbook Photo Library and remove the undesirables. I sometimes will delete pictures off the camera if I know it’s already terrible. I pick a few that I really like and adjust the image to make it pop using iPhoto or just now Photos on the MacBook. Once a year I send our “school pictures” to Mpix.com and get them framed. I also use my favorite photos for my screen savers on my AppleTV and Computers. For my iPhone pictures and videos, I download them to the Macbook and do the same process there.

Once everything has been sorted and adjusted everything gets backed up onto an external drive on my home network. I went with Synology because it has an app that runs on my machine and will automatically backup my files to the NAS. If you are an Amazon Prime user, and who isn’t these days, there is a free app that will store unlimited photos. So if you segregate your pics and videos like I do, you can have that extra layer of security.

Taking your pet on vacation.

~ SA Otey

You take your dog everywhere. The grocery store, restaurants, movie theaters, and airplanes. I’m not talking about service dogs, I’m speaking of people’s pets.  Taking your dog everywhere is the cool and hip thing to do. So why not take it on vacation? After all, the dog is part of your family, so why not let it enjoy all of your adventures. However, if you don’t take your dog on vacation, please find someone who can look after them.

We have a cat and if we are gone for more than two days then we hire a house/pet sitter. We pay them to come and stay at our house. They sleep here, they eat here, and they take care of our pets. Cats are pretty easy to take care of and don’t need much attention. Cats really don’t need humans.

dogFace

However, if you have a dog, it’s a different story. Dogs need constant attention because they are highly social creatures. If you don’t hire a house sitter then take your puppers to the kennel where they can get social interaction. Leaving your dog in your house overnight and someone letting it out all day is unfair to your dog and your neighbors. The dog will bark all day because it’s lonely. If there are two dogs they will try to out-bark each other. If you are going to be cruel, take it up a notch and just throw on a shock collar and leave it outside in the cold. At least it won’t bother anyone else since you won’t be bothered with caring for your animals.

Running on Christmas Cheer Fumes

~ SA Otey

Every year we get super excited for Christmas and when December 25th rolls around we are ready for it to be over. One year I started way too early. We visited Disney Theme Parks the week before Thanksgiving and all the decorations were up and the holiday music was blasting. We had our Christmas tree up before Thanksgiving. I jumped the gun that year on the Holiday Cheer and ran on fumes.

Next year we will wait until Black Friday to start decorating. That way we don’t get burned out like a Yankee candle on the mantle all night. We are already removing Christmas items from the house and putting them back in storage. We usually wait until January 2nd. I think it makes Christmas gloomy.

Beginners guide to vaping?

~ SA Otey

I have nothing against vaping or people who vape until they start building their own cumulonimbus around a no-smoking sign at a child’s sporting event or amusement park. I wonder when they will invent a vape helmet so that you can contentiously enjoy your emissions?

Most people set a New years resolution to stop smoking. I think this year I will start smoking. I can start with the lowest level nicotine pouch so I can build up a tolerance.  Next, I’ll start chewing the cigarette-flavored gum. Hopefully, I can then graduate to vaping so that I can billow clouds of smoke to attract attention to myself. I guess my final step in the journey is to smoke regular cigarettes once vaping becomes too costly. It’s either that or putting my mouth on the smoke holes on the restaurant’s outdoor ashtrays.

Happy Boxing Day

~ SA Otey
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I never understood what Boxing Day was until I made some friends from the Great White North. I thought it was a day when we remembered the greats like Cassius Clay or Mike Tyson punching people in the face. It’s either that or a day when we box up all of our gifts that we didn’t like and take them back to the stores in which they came.

Probably the most ungrateful I’ve ever been for a gift was when I was a small child. I received a bean bag chair from my grandmother for Christmas. I loudly exclaimed in tears, “You don’t get furniture for Christmas”.  My childish mind thought that only toys were permitted. I remember her running up to the closest gas station that was open and buying me a green “suckerman”. At least I had a toy, my temper tantrum worked!

Christmas Day Checklist

~ SA Otey
  • Wake up way too early because the kids didn’t sleep at all
  • Open presents, either from Santa or hard-working parents who paid for them
  • Eat breakfast – We make a sausage egg and cheese casserole.
  • Jump in the car, take off (drive about 2 hours with no traffic)
  • Arrive at the first stop
  • Open presents
  • Eat lunch
  • Jump in the car, take off (30-minute drive)
  • Arrive at the second stop
  • Open presents
  • Eat dinner
  • Collapse in exhaustion
  • Wonder how the kids are still going strong.
shallow focus photography of religious figurines
Photo by Jessica Lewis on Pexels.com

This is the shortlist, it used to be much longer and covered a much longer distance. Between the food, fun, family, and yes sometimes fighting, don’t forget about Jesus during this time. It’s the whole point of it all.

Christmas Eve Traditions

~ SA Otey

My Christmas Eve traditions have evolved over the years. Long story, bear with me.

Grandparent Traditions

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We used to wait for my Dad to get off work and ride to my paternal Grandparents’ house. We would usually be one of the last to arrive since my father worked for Federal Express helping Santa’s sleigh finish its route. Upon entering their home, you would be greeted by the warmth of the floor furnace. It was an open grate that continuously pumped heat. I’m not sure how that was safe and that we didn’t get roasted as children. I swear you could smell your shoes melting.

There was plenty of food and it all tasted fantastic. However, you couldn’t smell any of it. All the adults smoked cigarettes which built a nicotine barrier that food aromas couldn’t break through. Christmas Eve always felt like the longest evening. We would stare at the mountain of presents under a 3-foot-tall tall already decorated tree that was erected before the evening and taken down the next day. The grown-ups wanted to sing by the piano but we wanted to see what was under all those wrappings. Once we started opening presents (after a few 10-minute delays) it didn’t take long before the night was over and we were on our way home.

Starting our Own

We live just far enough where we have to do our own thing for Christmas Eve. Otherwise, we would have to spend Christmas morning at someone else’s place. I wanted my kids to wake up in their own house on Christmas morning. We keep it pretty simple. We watch Christmas movies and bake treats. We have a nice steak dinner and then attend a Christmas Eve service at our Church. We then drive around and look at Christmas lights. We come home, open one gift, and then hit the sack. We then watch a few more Christmas movies while we wrap the final gifts.

It’s important to start and keep traditions, but also remain flexible. Someone in your family is always going to be unhappy, don’t let it be you.

Welcome to Cheat Week?

~ SA Otey

Most diets will let you have a cheat day, but the days following Christmas to New Year’s are declared cheat week. If you know you will be going back on your diet, why not try to gain as much weight as possible to skew those top numbers so it will look like you accomplished more? Who are you kidding? You haven’t been on a diet since Thanksgiving and have been enjoying a cheat month.

One time at work, they had a competition of who could maintain their weight during the holidays. If you stayed within a few pounds, then you would get a gift card or something. I had a co-worker who actually lost weight during the challenge. Here’s how he did it. On the day of the weigh-in, he had on a big sweater with an undershirt, canvas cargo pants, and boots. When he was weighed after the holiday,s it was unseasonably warm and he was only wearing a Dri-fit polo shirt, some light khaki pants, and loafers. He lost 4 lbs over the holidays! Talk about a real cheat month!

But seriously, why not just treat food with respect and enjoy food but don’t overindulge.