For those of you who know me, it comes as no surprise that I tell you I have a lot of quirks. For those who know me well enough that you are in my phone’s contacts, you have most likely experienced one of these quirks on every major holiday. With that said, it is with a little bit of sadness that on this Halloween evening I need to make an important announcement and lay to rest one of my personal traditions.

I am ending my holiday text message greeting.

For the past nine years, I have spent time, thought, and money creating a text/picture message for every major holiday to send my contacts. These messages have always been over the top and rather silly (for the complete background on how these holiday greetings came to be, click here). Meant just as much to make fun of myself as they were to jab at the people who sent a generic “Merry Christmas” text to their entire contact list, they started to become more and more popular over the years. They also started to become more time consuming too.

For over a decade, I staged over the top photos to accompany holiday text messages. My Christmas Eve photos were always a little wacky. Besides sending these photos to my family and friends, I have never published any of these photos before because I considered them an “exclusive” for those I especially cared about.

After about the fifth year of sending out holiday messages, I started asking myself what can I do this time around? How can I top last year’s Christmas Eve reindeer stable message? How I can top last year’s makeshift Easter egg hunt greeting? I started to go to greater lengths to make more outrageous messages and at times it took away from my time actually enjoying the holiday. As my wife and mom might be able to tell you, it started to get a little out of control.

Easter and Fourth of July photos were always fun to do.

But I am not ending my holiday text message greetings just because of the time component. Factoring into the decision is also the fact that I am now 30. I am married and I have a baby on the way. At some point you have to grow up just a bit. Unfortunately wearing Santa costumes, sporting goofy hats, and writing sappy messages aren’t quite in tune with the “growing up” process.

I will miss having an excuse to connect with my friends and family I don’t get to talk to often. I will miss the texts of gratitude I received from people who would text back and I say I brightened their holiday. I will even miss the mean texts from my college friends and brother who would always text back saying I was an idiot and embarrassing.

For the Christmas Day photos I always tried to “class it up” a bit.

What I won’t miss is the stress of coming up with a concept for each holiday. I won’t miss driving from party store to party store looking for different props. I won’t miss going up to random doorsteps asking people if I could use their holiday display as a backdrop for my photo. I won’t miss ferociously sending out the message on the morning of every holiday.

I want to thank everyone who has been a recipient of my messages over the years for tolerating them. You all have been a gracious audience. If anyone else wants to pick up the torch and start sending out your own holiday messages, I can sure hook you up with a bunch of old props. Don’t Blink.