The annual highlight of the holiday season, Illuminations Tour, is set to kick off this weekend throughout the city.

Community members are invited to experience sparkling holiday displays created by their neighbors when they embark on a self-guided Illuminations tour. Illuminations Tour is set to begin on December 12, 2025, and run through January 12, 2026.

So, the first significant snowfall of the season may soon be here, leaving us with a picturesque Currier and Ives-type dusting of the region just in time to serve as decoration for the holiday season.

Does everyone love it? No. Does anyone hate it? Maybe. Some can live with it, while others wouldn’t live without it.

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The practice of salting and drying Cod has been around for hundreds of years. It was used to preserve large quantities of fish for long periods of time while out at sea. Many cultures use this technique for preservation, including those located in the Mediterranean, Northern Europe, the Caribbean, and Brazil just to name a few. Of course, with the celebration of Christmas upon us, that brings us to the Italian-American tradition of what is called the Feast of the Seven Fishes served on Christmas Eve.

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Review by Tom Miller

Sebastian Lockwood is a story teller and a good one. He makes use of his skills in his most recent publication Headless In Hancock 1882 which he sets in the Hancock Inn and Fox Tavern, an establishment that has actually been in existence since 1789, and in the surrounding Mondack region. Lockwood is unabashedly in love with the area which he pays homage to in the book. In the introduction he declares the work to be “historical fiction” which indeed it is, allowing him the freedom to tell a good story without letting mere facts get in the way. Having said that, one needs to understand that Lockwood went to great lengths to “get it right” in the sense of the political and social sensibilities of a small town in New Hampshire in 1882. After all the Civil War is just seventeen years in the past and many of the societal opinions regarding slavery and abolition still circulate. The radical Puritans still rule south of the Merrimack River. Electricity has not quite brought the onslaught of modernism to the area. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is in effect. Boston and New York are intriguing but frightening places. Railroads are sort of the thing … elsewhere.

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Every now and then I put a poem of my own in the Lyrical Somerville.

Doug Holder is the arts/editor of The Somerville Times, he is on the board of the New England Poetry Club, and the Friends of the Longfellow House. He is the co-founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, MA. and teaches at Endicott College in Beverly, MA.

Center to provide hot meals, bathrooms, and safe sleeping spaces for adults experiencing homelessness

As we approach the coldest months of the year, the City of Somerville is once again opening a winter season Emergency Overnight Warming Center to support adults experiencing homelessness. Starting on Monday, December 8, 2025, through April 12, 2026, the warming center will offer a safe place to sleep and a range of other services.

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The trailer is ” Voices of Somerville” produced by Olivia Huang. It concerns the voices of poets from Somerville, and others in the area. The movie includes Somerville residents Gloria Mindock, Doug Holder, Lloyd Schwartz (Somerville Poet Laureate), Denise Provost and others. The full movie will be out next month.

A live virtual Design Public Hearing (DPH) and an Open House will be hosted to provide the public with the opportunity to become fully acquainted with the proposed roadway reconstruction project on McGrath Highway on Tuesday,  December 9, 2025, 6:30pm –  8:00pm