Closing out 2025

The last 6 holiday sketches and saying good-bye to 2025

I am closing out 2025 with my last holiday sketches of 2025. Plus how this year went….

2025 as the new year

At the beginning of 2025, I sat down with my Bullet Journal and various artists’ suggestions on how to plan out your year; setting goals and scheduling target dates, and so on.

“Yeah, I GOT this,” I was thinking as I planned out the year. I diligently mapped out each month and quarter. I thought I planned and accounted for everything, including my daughter’s wedding, expected travel plans, holiday weekends and activities during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season.

The wedding plans absorbed more time than I originally thought I’d need but I happily chugged along with the planning assistance and creative tasks. The wedding was beautiful and we had a great time in St Augustine. A happy beginning to the year.

After the wedding…..

Dickens, our 6 month old kitten, had a routine kitten checkup where a potential dental issue turned into a trip to Gainesville to a dental specialist.

In the meantime, Mack, our geriatric Chihuahua became ill and eventually left to go to the rainbow bridge. There was a post back in June about Mack.

Summer

Dickens’ dental issues, turned out to be self inflicted. Not the brightest bulb in the box, but at least we know it wasn’t serious.

We up drove up to the grandkids in NJ & NY. It was good to see everyone. We took Lucy, our other Chihuahua, and left Dickens with our daughter.

Lucy had her first Cape May Ferry ride and she flew for the first time. At the airport, she tried to take on the airport security dog, who got in hot water with his handler for letting a tiny chihuahua distract him from his duties.

Around the end of summer, I found Flori Fama from one of my artist groups. She was so excited about Halloween that she started a group to start sketching for Halloween. I joined her group and I awaited September.

Autumn

Flori’s Halloween Challenge started and was so much fun. I didn’t do Inktober this year because they don’t do Halloween prompts and I love Halloween so that was a no brainer. 

Holidays

A new addition to the family

While we were Christmas shopping in November….a little black fur ball came into our lives. We came across a long haired black chihuahua that we named Teddy. Where Mack had a heavy thick coat, Teddy has a very fine coat and he feels the cold, unlike Mack, who used to play in the snow and have snow dingles hanging from him.

After Halloween, the Holiday prompts

When Halloween ended, we all wanted to keep going with Flori and the group. Flori came up with prompts for December and we had a blast doing them.. 

I posted the first 6 in last week’s news for December. Here are the final 6.

Day 7 – North Pole bound – I interpreted this as letters to Santa..featuring Teddy because Flori’s holiday group wanted to see Teddy in my illustrations

Day 8 – Snow Kissed Village

Day 9 – Chimney Jam – featuring Teddy

Day 10 – Sugar Cookies by the fire. My Christmas card was used as a springboard for this one. I already had the cookies and milk. I moved the whole scene over to add the fireplace, which was our fireplace when we used to live on Long Island.

Day 11 – A gingerbread tail (tale) – I used my past characters from #drawcatsformom to create this scene.

Day 12 – Flori suggested Summer Christmas since she was originally from Argentina and it is summer there right now. I went with Tropical Christmas because I live in Florida.

Christmas and December were nice. I had fun doing the Christmas prompts. I also managed to get some reading done. I can’t complain about 2025, even though we lost Mack. And I found out some things about myself that helped me realize where I was chasing my own tail and what it is I really like doing. 

Happy New Year.