Welcome to 2025

How was your night? Intimate and warm? Raucous, noisy and fueled by alcohol? However you decided to greet the New Year, I hope you are home safely reading this. Welcome to 2025! I think it’s going to be wonderful start to finish with new projects, a whole passel of new people who are bright and shiny in their visions; our paths have already begun to cross, casually on the street, but with .

Twenty minutes of fireworks provided by the city last night and the occasional personal rocket going off as people walked up the hill past my house (taxi drivers take NYE off). Noise is so much a part of life in Mexico and it can make you crazy if you let it. At the end of COVID, when local bars reopened with dancing, laughter and gaitey, I swore then to never complain about anybody having fun again. It’s LIFE, people, play it loud while you can, it does have an expiration date stamped on it.

With Christmas and New Year’s falling smack mid-week and thus screwing up the days before and afterwards, I thought I could gear up for this coming Monday to start really working again, but no. Monday is Epiphany, Day of the Three Kings, where lots of kids get presents just like baby Jesus did. Is this the last day of Christmas then? One would think but again, no.

On January 06, Epiphany, every business and home has a Rosca de Reyes, a soft, round cake with a plastic baby Jesus baked inside it. (Eat this very gingerly and chew thoroughly.) Often, you can win a prize, or some kind of gift BUT you also have to throw a party on Candlemas Day on February 03 and invite those present who saw you get baby Jesus in your cake. And, you have to serve tamales and atole (which is fine heavily laced with rum…). So Christmas just keeps on giving; it helps ease the lag time to Easter, which in Mexico takes a full two weeks to celebrate, but that’s another column yet to be written.

Entertainment coming up this week includes Bingo today at Nacho Daddy for Colina Spay and Neuter Clinic. A Gay Mixer by Out and About Puerto Vallarta magazine at the gorgeous Casa Cupula up on the hill overlooking our fair city tomorrow. New York City Broadway stars Brent and Bernie sing love songs at Act2PV on Friday and the Arte Vallarta Museo’s First Saturday of the year follows.

We will enjoy today softly, this first cleansing day of the year 2025. Breathe your love into it and if we all do that, this year will go down in history as the biggest Love-In in the world, right here in Puerto Vallarta. Peace and love, people and hugs every, single day.