Opinion

It’s become a staple Christmas Grinch feature for small town papers, metro dailies, and even NPR: The Salvation Army’s familiar bell ringers with kettles for donations are banned from yet another collection site. This year’s villain is the Target chain, which gets a fair amount of favorable publicity at other times of the year from its foundation’s support of a variety of charitable causes. Target’s excuse is that if they let the Salvation Army collect, everyone else wants to do it too. Sorry, but that’s not good enough. -more-

The long weekend gave us the opportunity to spend a couple of days in what we still call “the country,” on the property where the publisher’s mother settled after she came to Santa Cruz as one of UCSC’s first faculty members. She called it “the ranch”—about 60 rocky acres, a fair portion of which is pretty much vertical, mostly covered with second growth redwoods and eucalypts planted at the turn of the 20th century. The driveway through the woods is about a mile long, rutted dirt with seven switchbacks, an easy ascent for the benefit of the horses who pulled wagonloads of supplies up to the summer camp operated by the owners at the time, but a challenge for automobiles. -more-