Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or nothing in particular, December is a month chock-full of events. Arts organizations gear up for a major blitz of happenings, from concerts of choirs and handbell ensembles and full orchestras, to holiday-themed plays and gallery shows. We offer a sample in our December edition of First Friday Arts. This monthly feature is all listener-generated: phone calls from arts organizations and individuals fill out the list of arts events around the

The official histories of places on the map can be a bit on the plain-vanilla side, featuring the dates and the places and the people and how they effected change in their communities. Katy Tahja prefers a story with a bit of personality... like the gnarled old stagecoach driver, rather than the map of stagecoach routes. This is the approach she takes in "An Eclectic History of Mendocino County," a collection of stories from the last 150 years on the California Coast. The author visits to talk

The big mental hospitals of the past, with thousands of people locked up, are largely gone. Instead, people with persistent mental illness are free to move about the country... and they frequently get arrested and locked up anyway, but in jails instead of hospitals. Ron Powers lost a son with schizophrenia to suicide, and it led him to reluctantly write a book, No One Cares About Crazy People: My Family and the Heartbreak of Mental Illness in America .

You can be forgiven for watching or listening to the news and doing that little head-tilt things that dogs do. Because what we see and hear doesn't always make sense. Political and societal norms have been inverted and subverted in our time, and it's making people cranky. “Finding Your Sanity in an Insane World” is the title of a conference coming to Ashland on December 14th, offered by the Architects of the New Paradigm Conference series. Can people learn how to get a grip, in a single day?

The shutting of the recycling pipeline to China put a serious dent in recycling efforts on this side of the Pacific. Where we could once bale up our recyclables and ship them overseas, we're now stuck with them, since China won't take them. As the group Environment Oregon points out, that means recycling efforts are backsliding; fewer people are recycling or able to, and more of our stuff ends up in landfills, which recycling was supposed to prevent.

The kind of city you want to live in when you're young and have a fast car may be VERY different from the city you want to live in a few decades or even years later. Needs change as life goes on, and 8 80 Cities recognizes that. The gap in the name is deliberate; the group works to create cities and urban spaces that are friendly for people age eight or 80. The thinking is that a city friendly to those ages is friendly to just about anyone. Gil Peñalosa founded 8 80 Cities and plans to visit

Before you get a novelty Christmas song hopelessly stuck in your head, take a musical interlude with Josh Gross , in Rogue Sounds. Josh is a music creator, with multiple talents of his own. He's also a lover of music in many forms and genres. Josh compiles a list of musical acts playing the region in the coming weeks, and presents his compilation in Rogue Sounds, once a month.

If you plan on purchasing health insurance on the marketplace for 2020, time is running out. The sign-up period for next year closes on December 15th. For Oregon buyers, the state collects the available plans for perusal at the Oregon Health Insurance Marketplace .

Most of our region is not blessed with abundant rainfall. So maintaining a lawn or garden can take a lot of work and water. Which is why some people look for alternatives, like xeriscaping and rain gardens. One is a nearly water-free way of landscaping, the other features native plants in shallow soil. Kora Mousseaux at the Jackson Soil and Water Conservation District is familiar with both approaches to outdoor planting.

It's not that climate change is coming; it is here. Any of a number of events and statistics point to that reality. But politics, as has been demonstrated, is not so much about reality as finding what different groups of people will accept. Alice Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz both have experience exploring policy and politics related to climate change; both worked for the Obama administration on climate policy. They joined forces for a book, Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for