About Us

After years of optimistic holiday planning that ended in disappointment, I finally gave up and lowered my expectations. My car burned up on the Fourth of July. Thanksgiving and Christmas were spent shuttling between divorced parents. Throughout my marriage I have spent every New Year’s Eve cooking and cleaning in preparation for the 100+ people who show up for my husband’s (not my!) traditional New Year’s Day open house. Not that New Year’s Eve was ever a success for me in my single years. And don’t even get me started on Valentine’s Day.

In short, I have finally accepted that holidays suck. Screw Martha Stewart and Hallmark, it’s all a big crock. The people we love will let us down, the food won’t taste anything like the magazines tell us, no one wants to clean up, and there’s a reason fireworks are illegal in most states.

I knew I couldn’t be the only one who feels this way, so I thought up HellishHolidays.com. Here, it’s OK to admit that you’re miserable when you’re supposed to be happy, that you hate what you’re supposed to love. We all feel better knowing that others share our pain, and it’s a lot easier to laugh at someone else’s exploding oven than your own. Join us and share your own stories, or just be a voyeur and see what everyone else is going through. I can’t promise you won’t cry, but I do promise you’ll laugh, too.

Laura Foti Cohen

The Team

Laura Foti Cohen

Laura is a writer and an independent consultant, providing strategic counsel and marketing and editorial services to a wide range of clients at the intersection of entertainment and technology. Prior to forming her consulting practice, Sound Input LLC, Laura served as Senior Vice President of Philips Interactive Media, working in CD-Interactive, CD-ROM and the Internet. During her nine years with Philips she played key roles in areas from product development to marketing to business development. She was previously Director of Marketing for RCA Video Productions (BMG) and Video Editor of Billboard in the early days of MTV. She holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University.

Steve Loyola

Steve is the President and CEO of Best Web Buys, which he founded in 1997. Much of his career before that was spent at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he led many software development projects, including a paperless materiel acquisition system, three modules of a large Oracle Financials re-engineering project, and various Deep Space Network and Space Station scheduling and forecasting projects. After receiving a B.S. in Biology from Caltech, Steve earned two Masters degrees: Computer Information Systems from Claremont Graduate School and Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

For more information, please contact us at info (at) hellishholidays.com.

HellishHolidays.com is operated by Life Version Two LLC.