Happy New Year! Welcome to the year 2025! Keen-eyed readers may have noted they are reading Volume 26, Issue 1 of Evansville Living. You’ll find the volume and issue number on page 5, the table of contents. When Creative Director Laura Mathis flips the calendar on that page, it always gives us pause. Laura has been directing the creative of this magazine since the start. The single act of changing the volume number causes us to react: Wow, we’ve been doing these 26 years! Not that we thought we would not! The number makes an impact.
It’s also confusing. In the September/October issue, I wrote that 2025 will be a big year for Tucker Publishing Group, Inc., as we celebrate our 25th anniversary in the March/April issue. The first issue of this magazine, March/April 2000, was Volume 1, Issue 1, so we will mark the 25th anniversary of Evansville Living with the March/April 2025 issue, in our 26th year of publishing. The issue with volume numbering is analogous to the question, “When does a decade begin and end?”
With the completion of this issue, we’ve stashed away the templates. The 25th anniversary will be celebrated with a bit of an update in the structure and flow of the magazine and the way it looks. We’re not going rogue; Evansville Living will be recognizable as the brand we are grateful you have welcomed into your lives. As we produce each issue, we talk about what we did right or that we might want to change. Those thoughts and discussions are being incorporated in a new look you will see in the next issue. Keep this issue handy so that you can compare it to the March/April issue!
This issue recognizes Evansville’s multiculturalism. Our writers expressed they really enjoyed putting together “The World is Here” (page 36).
“One of the best things about our profession is being able to meet compelling people who otherwise might not cross your path,” says Senior Writer John Martin. “That’s why this issue of Evansville Living will go down as one of my favorites. People who relocate from other countries bring such interesting life experiences, and I hope our readers enjoy their fascinating, unique stories.”
Reading our package, I recalled an immersion into Greek culture our family was invited to experience about a dozen years ago. Doros and Ellada Hadjisavva, mainstays in the Evansville restaurant and catering landscape for the same 25 years we have operated, invited us to join their Cypriot family in Henderson, Kentucky, for their Easter dinner. It was a feast, served at a table to seat two dozen, like nothing I had ever before witnessed, including the traditional whole roast lamb.
We learned from Doros that Greek Easter also is known as Pascha, the most important religious holiday in Greece, and is celebrated with deep spiritual and cultural significance. It typically differs in date from Western Easter due to the use of the Julian calendar by the Greek Orthodox Church.
Before and after dinner, the children, all elementary and middle school students at that time, played soccer in the yard. It’s a wonderful memory, derived from the opportunities that a multicultural community afford us.
Thank you for reading Volume 26, Issue 1 of Evansville Living. Have a wonderful new year ahead!
As always, I look forward to hearing from you.
