The Hoboken Girl Team’s Holiday Message

Dear Hoboken Girl readers and friends,

2025 kicked off with our 13th birthday, and we’ve been constantly reminded of the path we’ve been on and how much more there is to learn. 

One constant has been you: our readers, supporters, commenters, neighbors, and friends. It truly feels like we’ve created a little community here on the internet (and IRL in Hoboken + Jersey City), and that’s the whole point. The DMs, the emails, the shares, the reads, the laughs, the stories — it’s all what brings us together at the end of the day. Thank you for the encouragement as we explore what makes where we live so interesting, and as our team of journalists connects you to the most crucial pieces of our neighborhoods, which include the good and the challenging.

Something we’re teeing up for January 2026 is a focus on screen-free activities (because we haven’t met a single person who isn’t trying to cut back!), and to kick that off, we rounded up 25 screen-free things to do in Hudson County (reminds us of our Unplugged #HobokenGirlSocial circa 2019, tbh…). 

Analog 2026 is where we’re at — and realizing that we’re writing this FROM the internet feels a little hypocritical and meta, but you get the idea.

But, in the meantime, we’re closing the year with our own TLG highlight reel, sharing some of the things that happened in 2025 that we’re most proud of. 

• Supporting non-profits: We were able to support over 15 local non-profit organizations through our initiatives, including the HG Puppy Bowl, our HG Women’s Networking Event, and the Hoboken Girl Breakfast Sandwich, totaling over $3,000 raised for Wise Animal Rescue and over $10,000 raised for Hudson County CASA + Hoboken Public Education Foundation, as well as donating $10,000 ($1000 each to 10 local non-profits in the New Jersey area) to local non-profits of our readers choosing for Giving Tuesday.
• Along those lines, we launched The Local Girl Gives! This is something we’ve been doing since 2017 with our Hoboken Girl Helps initiatives, where we volunteer in-person with groups of our readers and organize ways to give back, and this year we were able to donate $10,000 10 NJ non-profits ($1000 each), based on who you shared with us. The non-profits we gave back to included:
  • New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children;
  • The Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum
  • Guttenberg Arts; the Hudson Pride Center;
  • Waterspirit;
  • Tomorrow’s Children’s Fund
  • Whole Spectrum Autism;
  • FARAH: Foundation for Arab American Heritage;
  • Wise Animal Rescue; and
  • The Forest School at Tenafly Nature Center
• We launched a new interface of our site, and parent brand, The Local Girl
• We redesigned our sites and launched our newest sister site, The Fairfax Girl in FFX, Virginia. 

We spotlighted dozens of adoptable animals, and of course, countless small businesses and community members who are what make our communities what they are. We also covered the Hoboken election, including polling all the Mayoral and Council candidates on their visions; looked into crime statistics in Hoboken; figured out why there are so many coffee shops in town; and did the deep investigative journalism of organizing all the pizza slices in Hoboken by price. 

We’ll still be posting a bit here and there, but our core team will be OOO from December 25th to January 4th.

Our out-of-office messages are up, our DMs will have an auto-reply, and we’ll be a bit off the grid this week. On January 5th, we’ll be back with regular content. You’re welcome to send us tips at any time to [email protected] + @thehobokengirl on Instagram, but they’ll be read upon our return.

See you next year! 

The Hoboken Girl Team