This is a hard post to write because the facts of what happened are hard to bare.
This site was launched in 2024 with a beautiful Christmas Disney Gift Guides Month. Then came the collector content and on to actually writing about Christmas.
We planned Christmas and we then celebrated it with articles about food,gifting, planning and decorating.
We were so happy with our blog and you seemed to like it too.
We built an audience, we built community and we were beginning to get excited about the possibilities.
i monetised this site with affiliate links for the first time in January 2026 and we were excited.
We got to the point ai was recommending us then in May of this year we were hit by a virus that corrupted our articles and destroyed our blog.
Naturally we were gutted.
The team left. I stayed.
I’m Hayley a Christmas enthusiast from South Wales UK , and I am determined to bring you a very happy festive season on this blog.
My original plan was to restore my old archive in one shot. Google soon put a stop to that.
Apparently I have to rewrite the articles without ai.
You see, I used a hybrid model for some of my posts.
I’m very capable of writing myself but I used ai for some sections of my posts and that flagged this website.
I also used ai in my images and again that got flagged so I’ve bought the images that I will be sharing or making pins from.
My promise to you is that although Festive Friends will be a slow burn, I plan to make it as useful as possible with as little ai as possible.
We will have a Christmas adventure here.
Are you in?