The city is chock-full of local businesses whose owners and employees strive to create shopping experiences that are actually fun and rewarding. It’s no wonder the city has been on the vanguard of the buy-local movement; Santa Feans well understand the value of supporting their independent shops, artisans and organizations.

Santa Fe understands the importance of introducing kids to art at an early age, and so, it seems, does the White House. On Oct. 20, in a ceremony at the White House, representatives from Fine Arts for Children and Teens (FACT) were presented with the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award.

The holidays are a great time to remember those less fortunate—but it seems like everyone chooses the holidays as the time to remember and, the rest of the year, they forget.

We all know the story or, at least, most of us do. Toward the end of the year in AD 1, a bunch of shepherds and wise men all went to Bethlehem to see a pretty special baby born to a virgin in a hay loft. The North Star was shining, the sheep were bleating and all was calm on that holy night. Only, that’s probably not exactly what happened.

For millennia—some say for 4,000 years—hygienic Indians (as in, from India) have been receiving what we are only just discovering in the rest of the world: the legit benefits of having someone rub your head for a while.

I woke up one morning last spring and decided I wanted to be a backpacker. (Yes, it really did happen that quickly.) I am not your ideal backpacking candidate: I haven’t hiked in years, I’m overweight, I’m a bit of a hygiene maniac, I can’t cook and I don’t like peeing in the woods.

From Yellowstone to the Statue of Liberty to Little Rock Central High School, national parks and monuments dot the American landscape. New Mexico is home to a healthy heap of nationallyrecognized sites, and theres no better time than the present to ditch the European vacation and explore the wonders available right in your own backyard.

Nationally renowned writer Hampton Sides is a Memphis, Tenn. native and current Santa Fe resident. His most recent nonfiction book, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for his Assassin, paints an intricate portrait of the civil rights leader but, perhaps more notably, follows in great detail his assassin, a drifter known as Eric S Galt, John Willard, Harvey Lowmeyer and Ramon George Sneyd, but who was born James Earl Ray.

Antonin Artaud, an avant-garde writer, artist and actor who lived and worked in France during the first half of the 20th century, had a tortured life—he was prescribed heroin for severe headaches and spent his entire adult life addicted, detoxing, and checking in and out of mental institutions. In 1937, a trip to Dublin and his subsequent 17-day deportation back to France destroyed what shreds of sanity Artaud had left, yet opened the doors to his most visionary art. Artist Terry Allen wrote, produced and performs Ghost Ship Rodez, a fictional interpretation of this turning point in Artaud’s life.

Gail Y Okawa’s essay on her grandfather's internment in Santa Fe during WW II appears in the Museum of New Mexico Press book Telling New Mexico: A New History. In complement to Okawa’s March 28 lecture, part of the museum’s Telling New Mexico inaugural lecture series, SFR presents an excerpt from Okawa’s essay, “Finding American World War II Internment in Santa Fe: Voices through Time” and an interview with the author.