Blogmas #25 Merry Christmas! Blogmas Summary

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Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you have an amazing day whatever you get up to, and that Christmas 2015 is one to remember. Today marks the end of Blogmas, I really hope you've enjoyed it and that it helped you feel thoroughly festive in time for today.

This was my first ever year doing Blogmas, and I decided to take on the challenge as I wanted to push myself and try something new. I've gone through many phases of daily blogging in the past, but had never taken on an actual set project that could be succeeded or failed at- and once I'd made the decision that I was going to do it I wanted to make sure that I continued it right the way through to the end. The goals that I set for myself was that every post would be festive themed (ie, not simply a general post or review each day) and that it would be published at 10am each day. I also wanted to make sure that I had a good mixture of posts on a range of different Christmas related topics- baking, beauty, homeware, gift guides etc, and that it flowed in a way that there weren't too many similar topics posted on consecutive days. This definitely had it's challenges as lots of my ideas had to be published on specific days- or at least at a certain time in the month for it to make sense. For example I couldn't go posting gift guides three days before Christmas after it was too late to order online! Overall it was definitely more work than I anticipated, but I can honestly say I loved every minute of it.

To anyone considering trying Blogmas next year I highly recommend giving it a go as it was so much fun, and definitely does get you in the spirit of Christmas. My advice is to get as much prepared in advance as possible. I found that having a number of posts written and scheduled (or at least roughly planned) meant I didn't run out of time or end up rushing at the last minute. It was important to me that the quality of my posts didn't suffer and that I was happy with the standard of everything I was putting up, and in order to do this I found planning ahead was absolutely essential. I wanted to have enough done ahead of time so that my whole month wasn't spent writing, photographing and editing- with it being Christmas I still wanted to have fun and enjoy the time without feeling loads of pressure to get things finished. While there was often a lot of last minute tweaking and readjusting things throughout the month; if I'd have started from scratch writing a post each day ready for the next I'm not sure I'd have got it all done, simply because of the sheer amount of time a lot of the pieces took me to do. I think that's the thing with blogging, on the surface a post can look a few paragraphs and photos but in reality the time and energy spent preparing and writing it, editing and promoting is an awful lot- and definitely something to be aware of when taking on a daily blogging challenge!

I just wanted to say a huge thank you for all of your comments and support with Beautiful Solutions over Blogmas as well as over the past three years. Here's to many more to come :)

Sending lots of happiness and festivity your way,