To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Mostly cloudy, with a high near 78. Friday Night: A 20 percent chance of showers after 1am. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 62.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. Today: Incoming Palm Coast City Manager Michael McGlaughlin. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Florida Ethics Commission meets at 8:30 a.m. in the third-floor Courtroom, First District Court of Appeal, 2000 Drayton Drive, Tallahassee. Except for the closed-door session, the meetings are generally live on the Florida Channel.
Holiday Sale to Benefit Area Homeless: Holiday Sale featuring ornaments décor, jewelry, gifts, home décor, craft and more, Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 56 N Halifax Dr, Ormond Beach, Friday Dec. 5, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 6, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. All proceeds benefit outreach programs serving the local homeless. Members of the congregation and friends have donated holiday themed items and things perfect for gift giving for the event. Free parking is available, and bargains abound!
Santa in Bunnel: The Bunnell Police Department will be escorting Santa through the Bunnell neighborhoods. Santa will be coming to visit the neighborhoods of Bunnell for two nights in December, beginning the journeys from the Bunnell Police Department at 4:30 p.m., ready to spread holiday cheer throughout our community. The schedule:
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 57 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. Join a Ranger the First Friday of every month for a garden walk. Learn about the history of Washington Oaks while exploring the formal gardens. The walk is approximately one hour. No registration required. Walk included with park entry fee. Participants meet in the Garden parking lot. The event is free with paid admission fee to the state park: $5 per vehicle. (Limit 2-8 people per vehicle) $4 per single-occupant vehicle. Call (386) 446-6783 for more information or by email: [email protected].
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, at Athens Theatre, 124 North Florida Avenue, DeLand. 7:30 p.m. 386/736-1500. Tickets, Adult $37 – Senior $33 Student/Child $17. Book here. Celebrate the magic of Christmas with Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn—a heartwarming holiday treat packed with show-stopping dance numbers, dazzling costumes, and a treasure trove of timeless tunes. When Broadway performer Jim leaves the bright lights behind for a quiet Connecticut farmhouse, he ends up transforming his home into a seasonal inn, open only on the holidays. But with love in the air, rivalries heating up, and performances for every festivity, the holidays get a lot more exciting than he ever imagined. Featuring 20 beloved Irving Berlin classics—including “White Christmas,” “Happy Holiday,” “Blue Skies,” and “Cheek to Cheek”—this delightful musical delivers all the laughter, romance, and seasonal sparkle of a Christmas card come to life. Presented through special arrangement with Concord Theatricals
Storytime: “Alice Doane’s Appeal” is on the surface among Hawthorne’s more gothic tales. The surface is “deceitful verdure,” as we are about to discover in this almost polemical story about the shallowness of American memory. The horror–but by no means not the story, whose prose would make anyone prose pretender feel like a worm–is a mixed bag of sins past and present, unatoned for. Put a simpler way, if I am understanding the story (with the disclaimer that I am the ultimate unreliable narrator): We prefer to imprison ourselves in a present absolving of all pasts, however complicit we remain in the crimes of the past. The current conservative mantra against reparations of any sort, or in favor of restoring Confederate honors and monuments, has something to do with this. The unnamed narrator is on a summer afternoon promenade with two young women to the top of Gallows Hill, “the high place where our fathers set up their shame, to the mournful gaze of generations far remote.” On this Golgotha to 19 “witches” the narrator decides to tell his two companions, mute throughout, the story of a murder. Leonard Droane and his sister Alice had survived Indian raids as their parents and siblings had not. Leonard’s love for his sister had burst past the fraternal to the incestuous. When he suspects “a secret sympathy between his sister and Walter Brome,” Leonard’s “distempered jealousy” becomes “insane hatred.” Leonard murders Walter, who in his death throes takes on the appearance of the Droanes’ father, or so Leonard thinks, when Walter could as easily have been his twin, at least when he sees his own evil intent mirrored in Walter. Walter is projection. It does not help Leonard’s conscience to discover that a wizard to whom he described his deed turned out, like an Olympian god (not Hawthorne’s analogy, but a stand-in for Hawthorne, this whole story being a show of his wizardry as a writer), to have orchestrated Leonard’s passion and murder. The narrator goes on to describe to his little menage a macabre parade of Salem’s “dead of other generations, whose moss-grown names could scarce be read upon their tombstones, and their successors, whose graves were not yet green,” all accursed, including “maidens with untasted lips”–the kind of line that, added to so much else in this literary yellow brick road to Anais Nin, in Hawthorne’s day must have rated it most worthy of a mattress’ underside. This is the past from which we’ve all come, the narrator implies. The specter of Walter Brome appears to Alice, “absolving her of every stain.” The narrator is disappointed that his companions have not been frightened. They’d found the story “too grotesque and extravagant.” It was comedy to them. He was trying to show them their past, to appeal to their recognition of their ancestry on a hill never visited by the people below, however consecrated with the blood of martyrs is its soil. It is only when, walking back to town, the narrator describes the reality of Gallows Hill, when historical fact overtakes fiction, that his companions are finally frightened, as when he conjures the memory of “Cotton Mather, proud of his well-won dignity, as the representative of all the hateful features of his time; the one blood-thirsty man, in whom were concentrated those vices of spirit and errors of opinion that sufficed to madden the whole surrounding multitude.” Back at the bottom of the hill, Hawthorne mourns the absence of a memorial on that hill, “sadly commemorative of the errors of an earlier race.” As Robert Fossum wrote in a 1968 analysis that helped me better understand this satisfyingly complex story, “Hathorne’s fiction is that dark monument.”
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
December 2025
Holiday Plant Class Series
Florida Ethics Commission Meeting
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Holiday Sale to Benefit Area Homeless
Friday Blue Forum
Santa in Bunnell
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
‘Greetings,’ A Christmas Comedy
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Flagler Beach All Stars Beach Clean-Up
For the full calendar, go here.
The diary of Cotton Mather is a treasure-trove to the abnormal psychologist. The thing would be inconceivable if the record were not in print. What a crooked and diseased mind lay back of those eyes that were forever spying out occasions to magnify self! He grovels in proud self-abasement. He distorts the most obvious reality. His mind is clogged with the strangest miscellany of truth and marvel. He labors to acquire the possessions of a scholar, but he listens to old wives’ tales with greedy avidity. In all his mental processes the solidest fact falls into fantastic perspective. He was earnest to do good, he labored to put into effect hundreds of “Good devices,” but he walked always in his own shadow. His egoism blots out charity and even the divine mercy.
–From Vernon Parrington’s Main Currrents in American Thought, vol. 1: The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800 (1927).
Leave a Reply