Greetings from your community newspaper

Happy holiday season! Along with lights, trees and lawn displays comes this more recent tradition: the annual La Conner Weekly News subscription drive. These next three weeks your community newspaper will be delivered to every address in our local school district. Friends, neighbors and relatives of subscribers are invited to join the close to 900 households in greater La Conner who have decided that they are better off – and the community itself benefits – by their investment in their subscription to their local newspaper.

This is their – your – local newspaper. Everyone reading this editorial and taking the time to page through each week's issue is doing an increasingly rare thing. Several rare things, actually.

Each reader is self-identifying herself or himself as a member of this community. More: you are saying this community matters to me, in the same way that parents whose kids are grown, or retirees whose kids grew up elsewhere, come out for the high school basketball game or Rotary Santa Pancake Breakfast or Gilkey Square Christmas tree lighting.

When you read the Weekly News you get more details on the July 4th and Halloween parades even if your kids attended or their photos are on page 1.

When you subscribe to the Weekly News you are proving that the community matters to you, whether your live in Shelter Bay or Pleasant Ridge or the Swinomish Reservation.

When you take the time to read each week's issue, whether you are in front of the fire, on the back deck, in bed or on your boat, you are taking a bit of time to pause and hopefully to think and reflect about specific, local reasons why this area and community are important to you.

When you take the Weekly News out of your mailbox every week you are doing that odd democratic thing: you are in relationship with an independent, community-focused, locally-sourced newspaper. You are keeping your finger on the pulse of things large and small around you. You are doing something that your grandparents almost certainly did but it is questionable if your grandkids will.

In various ways, some as obvious as the boat parade and others as mysterious as a Glen Johnson letter on page 2, you are agreeing to be a stitch in the fabric holding your community together.

Many subscribers will tell you that the Weekly News is a part of their lives. I thank them for their attention, time and responsible participation in the community. That they give gifts of the paper is both generous and meaningful. That you, neighbors and friends, might join them will be better for all of us and strengthen the bond of community.

I hope you will.