A Christmas & New Year’s Blog Post

Happy New Year! 

As tradition, I start the new year with a miscellaneous life update post. If you’re new here and didn’t know about it, here’s last year’s blog post for you to read. You don’t have to, of course. It was more of a “way forward” blog post as I shifted my focus. 

Which I know, might be a surprise to some of you, especially if you recently found my website. Basically, I’ve been blogging since 2022 at this point but it’s actually last year that I got serious about it. Which is how we’ve gotten to creating more writing-centric blog posts.

Because the first rule of writing anything is to write what you love. And I just so happen to be obsessed with reading and writing. Even though I write about SEO a lot too, I’ll admit that it’s not my favourite thing to do. So, yeah.

For everyone who’s been here since the beginning of my journey, glad you’re still here!! So, I’m not sure when everyone will see this blog post. I’ve actually been working on redesigning my website right now and things are looking…a bit overwhelming.

But I’m sure I can manage it unless something goes horribly wrong.

Editor’s Note, as of Jan 28, 2026: It did go horribly wrong but that’s life. We move on.

Anyway, let’s go to lifestyle blogging mode for a minute and let me tell you what’s been up recently.

What I Did for Christmas & New Year’s

So, I actually have been on holiday since December 23rd. Work made me take a break which is actually quite funny because something went wrong on Christmas day and we could’ve avoided that if I worked half day on December 24th like I’d asked. But we’ll get to that later. 

Much Ado About The Tree

Anyway, I was late putting up a Christmas tree. Normally, literally the second week of December barely crawls by, and I put up the tree. I don’t have a nice, big (or even real) tree. I haven’t found a reasonably priced tree here either. Like, real Christmas trees can easily cost upwards of 10,000 TL here. For reference, the minimum wage right now is 30,000 TL, so that’s a big chunk of money to be spending on a tree. If anything, I’d rather spend that on presents. 

If anyone from Turkey is reading this, where do you guys get a tree? All my friends and I have the same kind of fake tree. I bought it back in 2022. I’d love to buy a real tree but I don’t want to spend a lot of money on it. Especially with inflation. 

But that’s a different topic. The point is, I actually put up the Christmas tree on December 23rd. I have NEVER done this before. So yeah, first time for everything? I don’t know.

Anyway, here’s the tree:

I know it’s small, but I think it looks pretty good. I made a full roast chicken for Christmas Eve. We always do a big dinner on the 24th but we were so—well, hangry—and it was a proper dinner so I didn’t take any pictures because I’m not a big photography person.

Most of these pictures are from my youngest sister’s phone. She has a small TikTok account where she basically posts videos and pictures about Istanbul. So, give her a follow here if you’re interested: turkiyediaries. Most of the homemade goods on her TikTok is made by me lol.

We ended up ordering dessert from this patisserie though:

Christmas Day 2025

So, we decided to do something different on Christmas Day. Usually, we’d have a big Christmas dinner at a hotel or something. But last Christmas in 2024, none of us were in the same city. Seriously. My youngest was in Ankara, she had finals; my other sister was visiting family back home and I was traveling for work.

As I mentioned in the New Year’s blog post from last January, I travel for work often so our dinner at a hotel tradition kind of died. So, instead, this year we decided to have a Christmas breakfast. Not sure if this is a thing or anything. And the weather forecast was low-key wilding because we hadn’t had snow yet. And I was hoping for a white Christmas.

Spoiler Alert: It did not happen. It snowed later. We got a White New Year’s. How fun.

But we had a Christmas breakfast. One of our friends was with us, it was fun.

A Christmas Miracle

Also, fun fact: KFC went bankrupt in Turkey or something (some people say it was because of a boycott. I’m not sure) at some point mid-2025ish and…I’ve been sad since. Because yeah, I am more of a McDonald’s person but I do like KFC. Like Popeye’s just ain’t it. And I don’t even eat fast food all that often but like, when I want to have fried chicken, I order KFC. So, for most of 2025, KFC was not in my life anymore and that made me sad.

I know these are first world problems but I do like KFC. Especially since Turkish cuisine is so different from my own…just having fast food chains makes me feel better about living abroad in a country where most people can’t even speak any of the four languages I am comfortable with. I like knowing that everything’s kind of connected. Which is why you’ll probably see A LOT of Starbucks content on my sister’s TikTok. Because Starbucks is EVERYWHERE, at every airport, every city, every country I’ve ever lived in. Except my own home country but that’s the point. I left my home country because I knew there was more to life than the narrow, exhausting path set for me there.

But this is becoming a sermon so I’ll stop. The point is, KFC is back in Turkey!

I have never been happier than I was ALL MONTH when I discovered that the KFC shop at Lens has been reopened. And it’s still cheap! McDonald’s gone weird expensive for fast food. KFC’s fine:3

New Year, New Snow and New Look (Ahead?)

The new year actually (finally) brought us some snow.

Editor’s Note, as of Jan 28, 2026: It only stopped snowing on Monday which I don’t like. It should snow all the way until April. WHY CLIMATE CHANGE, WHY? 

As you can probably tell, I love the snow. And now we get to the serious part of this blog post. What’s happening with ATITW in 2026?

Well, sometime this month, I’m going to do a comprehensive blog post on how to grow your blog in a year. I’ve done very well in 2025. I grew my Pinterest from hardly 1k views to 100,000+ in a single year. Same with the blog, we’ve gone from 300 maybe monthly visitors to 3k visitors in December.

So, I’m upping my antics and getting more aggressive to get to 10k monthly visitors by the end of the year. If I get around that figure, even 8k, I’ll be happy. 

And this year, I’m also getting serious about growing my BlueSky and Instagram. 

Your Expectations

Based on recent site metrics, I know a lot of people are coming in for writing guides and tutorials. I also have a lot of people (around ten to fifteen a month, that’s AMAZING!) reaching out to me for tips on writing and growing their blogs.

I’m happy to share this information for free. Because when the barrier to entry of a career or industry is just literacy and not even a college degree, I don’t see why people shouldn’t have access to it. Even if you don’t want to be a famous writer and just want to improve your writing skills, that’s great. Writing and blogging is a form of communication and based on my look around on the internet, it’s SCARY how bad people are at it.

So, I’m going to continue writing my guides and tutorials as usual. You will see a resources page here at some point and more sponsored posts, but I’m not expecting you to buy every software and tool I list. Buy what you think works for you and don’t bother with stuff that doesn’t.

What I Want to Do

When I got serious about ATITW in late 2024 and started planning for last year’s content, I’d noticed that a lot of stuff online is a pure grift. I get offering services. I have freelance clients too and I’m doing outreach right now as well. I actually show them this blog as a “Trust me, I know what I’m doing here. Here’s the stats” note.

What I don’t believe in is offering a $500 course on growing a blog. Yeah, that’s not going to work. I mean, why do I write about different blogging and SEO strategies? Not all of them work. You cannot possibly pack them into a course. I’d be fine with it if it was under $50. I just think it’s daylight robbery if an influencer or blogger who has never worked in any professional industry thinks they can charge high three-and-four figures on courses.

Freelancing and professional services are different. At least there’s a level of accountability there. But I’m not going to lie, I’ve lost a couple of clients last year who wanted to hire blitzy grifters. I know they’ll be back but that’s the point: the online ecosystem, the internet, is full of people who will take your money and not deliver what they promised.

So, what am I doing differently? I’m keeping everything free and accessible. Free guides, honest recommendations, and if I ever (and I have no plans to) create paid products, they’ll be priced fairly—enough to just pay for the $100 a year I pay on ATITW’s maintenance, not four-figure courses with no accountability. Just adding this caveat here in case I decide to publicly release some of the tools I’ve built at some point. I think it’s too niche but you never know.

What Does this Mean for ATITW?

We’re entering an era where your passion for arts, writing, reading and virtually anything really is being commoditised by AI tools. Specifically, genAI tools. Now, I use AI at work, I use it for blogging but I don’t think you can churn out a blog with JUST an AI tool and expect it to perform well. That’s lazy and it’s just a repeat of the same information.

SEO exists for a reason and after all the drama last year with GEO, AI SEO or whatever they were calling it, Google organic search traffic has ONLY fallen by 2.5%. Which makes sense because I still use Google for actual searching. Claude and ChatGPT (though I only use ChatGPT to vent nowadays) are more like, “hey, what’s this?”. My “commercial search intent” is very much still Google-centric. At some point over the summer, it was ChatGPT but I’m back to Google again.

The point is, you—the reader—could’ve clicked on the hundreds of different websites ranking for the specific writing guide you needed. You came to my blog and keep returning because I do the research and present (at least I think so) in-depth guides. I’ll be doing in-depth book reviews and analysis too as the year progresses. Sure, there are others who do a better job than me and I’m not upset if you also look at other sources like Jericho Writers. 

Actually, that site high-key helped me make my decision on starting a writing blog because there’s an audience for it. I didn’t think the audience was big enough before.

Bottom Line: We Do Well in 2026

So, 2026: we stick to our integrity and morals. We don’t write AI slop. AI is a tool, not a replacement. I’m going to continue to provide great content on the writing, blogging, SEO and random stuff side. There’s going to be sponsored posts here and there JUST to keep the lights on. I have a full-time job too. 

Would I love for this blog to be, say, the number one resource for writing and so I can quit working and work on short stories and my books full-time? Sure, but like—that’s at least five years out and I like my job too.

IF YOU WANT, you can support the blog. Use your money wisely. Not everything is an affiliate link; I always mention what is. Be smart about your finances, okay? If you want to pick my brain on starting a blog or writing a book—you know where to find me.

But we’re not offering courses. If anything, sign up to my newsletter—I’m making it a goal for 2026 to include three freebies on each newsletter and I want to send a newsletter out once every two weeks.

Now, I know this got really serious but the world’s a hellscape right now and we’re just surviving. So, make good decisions and a Happy New Year to you!