Covering the holidays

Another holiday season has come to greater La Conner. Santa jump started December, showing up at the La Conner Swinomish Library to read stories to children last Wednesday. He returned twice Saturday, first fortifying himself with pancakes at the annual La Conner Rotary Club breakfast before taking kids on his lap there and again that evening when he one-two-three POOF lit the town tree in Gilkey Square.

Shops are decorated for Christmas. Staff and customers alike are wearing holiday colored and themed sweaters. Saturday will be the most crowded day of the year, when thousands – maybe – will stand on the boardwalk and ohh and ahh the fitting the annual Swinomish Yacht Club sponsored lights boat parade. Here is your warning to make your dinner reservations now for post parade, at 7 p.m. Tourists driving out of town make it the slowest leaving town night of the year.

This is also the middle of the La Conner Weekly News annual subscription drive. If your didn’t see Santa last week you can – and will – read all about it this issue of the Weekly News. It is good to read and find out that in La Conner the commerce, postal and social center of our corner of the world, that discussion has started about charging for parking on First Street downtown. Next week the town council will approve the 2024 budget. Here is hoping that council members are adding $10,000 for their first ever appropriation in support of the new library, of which so many people are so very proud.

Lots of folks are proud – and glad – they get a copy of the Weekly News in the mail throughout the year. It keeps them current – and connected – to another “C” word: community. When newspapers are closing across the country daily, this one is reaching out to add subscribers, to keep more people informed of the world most important to them, the one outside their front door.

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 July 4th and Halloween parades 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.

I hope you will accept the invitation to tie yourself in a bit closer to this incredible place that so many of us are fortunate to call home. As the advertisements say, return the coupon, or scan the QR code or go to the website or do take the old fashion route as someone did Sunday and come to the office.

Join the family of readers keeping up to date on their community through their subscription to the La Conner Weekly News.

And, thank you.