Christmas Challenge Recap

My Christmas Challenge was nothing short of a challenge – if you have even glanced at my About page you most likely have a general idea as to how terrible I am at keeping up with projects I start. Typically, I can do great at keeping on top of something if there is something else at stake; take for example The Mosh Pit, it was off to a great start in its early stage – when I was graded on each post, but once the class and semester came to an end, well the updates had no schedule and began to fall short.

I knew updating oohgioia everyday for 25 days would not be a simple task, even with other blogs where I gave myself a one update a week schedule, I still seemed to fail (see Customer Critique) – so why did I really think this time would be different? Why did I accept my own personal challenge?

Bassically because if I don’t challenge myself, how am I going to get any better?

In setting my challenge I knew I would struggle to come up with topic ideas each day, so I set the Christmas theme. It worked, because while I hate being stuck to one overriding theme (lesson learned as The Mosh Pit began to become untouched) I would only be writing about Christmas for 25 days.

So on December 1 I said “Challenge Accepted.”

Under Christmas Challenge you can find 24 or now 25 post. With a simple one post a day for 25 days ratio, it looks like I did pretty well. However, don’t be fooled. I failed my own Christmas Challenge. I gave it a valiant effort, which believe me I am ecstatic about but I still did not succeed to fully complete my own challenge.

For those of you who follow along, maybe even get email updates you may recall my first slip up when Holiday Stress, the December 11 post  went to the Twitter news feed, emails and live sometime in the early afternoon on December 12 – despite having a December 11 time stamp. December 11 was just as stressful as the post might lead it on to be, or the holidays may have just gotten to me, either way I missed a post and tried to sneak it in the next day.

I felt so guilty about December 11 that when I realized I missed the December 17 and 18 as well, well I just could not try and pull a fast one on you again and I began to realize I was only cheating myself. The statistics for both those days were ugly, which alone encouraged me to get my posting back on track.

If you are wondering how I did regarding my first Christmas Challenge post on December 1… well, I mostly succeeded that one. I say mostly because even things that were not meant to be mean still came out in a snarky tone and because in explaining some of my frustration of Christmas gifts to friends – well the blunt truth just seemed to prevail . However, I did not go on any ranting rages nor did I complain (nearly) as much and I keep things civil each and every day (even if it just meant I said a very limited amount to them for 25 days).

I suppose if we apply a learning curve to the Christmas Challenge I pass, but honestly that doesn’t even matter to me. I learned a lot about my blogging habits through this challenge and I anticipate that it will help make me a better blogger writer.

Per usual, if you have a challenge you would like to pose to me, or have some topic you would like to see me cover leave a comment or send an email to oohgioia@gmail.com

Thanks for hanging in through the Christmas Challenge; I hope everyone has had an amazing holiday season.