Growing Up in Santa Cruz

Growing Up in Santa Cruz

Holiday Lights Guide

Santa Cruz Parks & Recreation introduces the Inaugural Holiday Glow Guide—a community-driven showcase of our area’s most festive and dazzling holiday displays. The Glow Guide features local homes with twinkling lights, creative decorations, and festive...

Glowing Drive-Thru at the Fairgrounds

Gowing reindeer, a snowman tipping his hat, bicycles circling the sky, a towering Christmas tree and a lit up water tank house are just a fraction of this year’s HOLIDAY LIGHTS drive and walk-through display...

Lindsey Chester Launches Theatre 831

You don’t have to tell Lindsey Chester that all the world’s a stage! Chester has devoted herself and two decades of artistic management helping young performers take their first steps with All About TheaterMany of...

Local Businesses Need Your Help

We got some disturbing news recently from two local businesses we love. They are struggling badly and need us to shop in their stores. The good news is that we can help them, just by...

Scrooge Meets Shakespeare

From the story that gave us the expression “Bah, humbug!” and the character Scrooge—A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, a new holiday tradition will debut next week. Santa Cruz Shakespeare Artistic Director Charles Pasternak has...

The Little Mermaid Jr.: A Tale of Curiosity, Longing and Acceptance

The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s ocean… or is it? This idea resonates deeply in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid Jr.,” a tale that explores the longing for a different life, the struggle to...

Tips for Supporting a Neurodivergent Child During the Holidays

For neurodivergent children, the holiday season can be challenging. This time of year is full of new experiences, new foods, new sounds, and new people. Simply put — for children who are neurodivergent, special needs...

Help Santa Cruz Pets Come Home for the Holidays

The Santa Cruz SPCA (SCSPCA) recognizes that a community without pet over-population, abuse, neglect, homelessness, and other animal welfare issues begins, in part, with youth education and involvement. Given this, we have created fun-filled programs...

5 Money Habits to Teach Your Kids in 2025

Good money habits start young, and teaching kids about finances doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are five simple, kid-friendly money habits that can set your children up for success in 2025 and beyond: 1...

Local Woman Makes ‘Not So Neighborly’ Holiday Game

Courtney Laschkewitsch, a Santa Cruz local, is an innovative, brilliant product licensing coach and tabletop gamemaker. Her ongoing career allows her to make people’s dreams come true, and now, she is bringing one of her...

Santa Cruz Gives Holiday Campaign 2024

As we embark on this year’s fundraiser for 63 local nonprofits, we can all be grateful that 2024 is the first year in quite a while without a community-wide crisis. While most years don’t have...

Be the Asking Parent, Not the Telling Parent

I think it’s safe to say that most humans do not like being ordered around and dictated to. The inner human spirit will rise up and push back in order to be the leader of...

A Guiding Value: Selfless Community Service

If you want to have new ideas, innovate, rise up from depression or heal a wound, the most direct path you can take to your goal is to forget about yourself for a time. I...

Holiday Guide

Here are some gift ideas for both kids and adults...

The Play’s The Thing

How is it the holidays already? Wasn’t it just summer? Isn’t it still summer? It sure feels like it. And aren’t things supposed to slow down in the winter? Not here and not for families...

Scrooge is Coming to Town

Santa Cruz Shakespeare (SCS), a nationally recognized professional repertory theatre company staging imaginative productions for more than a decade, debuts a new holiday tradition for the whole family with its production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Audiences...

Local Parents Find a Circle of Support in Aptos

The journey of pregnancy, birth and parenting is humbling, joyful, vulnerable and more than a little exhausting. And while many families navigate this season of life with minimal support, there is a team in Aptos...

Holiday Classic Comes to Mountain Community Theater

Miracle on 34th Street, the play based on the 1947 novel by Valentine Davies is a long-standing tradition at Mountain Community Theater. First adapted by MCT co-founders Peter Troxell and Rita Wadsworth in 1982, it...

SpongeBob SquarePants Swims into Cabrillo

Cabrillo College’s theater department is no stranger to musical theater. Cabrillo Stage mounts a high quality professional musical every summer, with two recent highlights being 2023’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and 2024’s In The...

Strategies to Build Resilience and Emotional Strength

According to Webster’s, resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. Here are strategies parents can use that are based on three well-researched, go-to resources for parents: SPACE (Supportive Parenting...

Meaningful Alternatives to Holiday Checks and Cash

Gifts of money are often received (and spent) with joy and appreciation that lasts about as long as it takes to get to the mall or log onto Amazon. But there are better ways to...

Mi Casa Es Tu Casa Exhibit Opens

Pajaro Valley Arts has opened their current and annual exhibit, “Mi Casa es Tu Casa” at their Sudden Street gallery. The show explores the connection between the living and those who have passed. The theme...