Oh, that’s an easy one! Get over to the Knoxville Convention Center and visit this year’s Fantasy of Trees! More than 2,000 people did that last night. With 300 Christmas trees, a gingerbread village, children’s activities, holiday gift shops and continuous music, it’s impossible not to get that magical feeling.
The whole Fantasy of Trees event [...]

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Tracy Dewhirst decided a couple of weeks ago to make a wreath out of some vines she found on her south Knox farm property. It turned out very pretty.
 So she thought she’d make one for a friend. Then she made one for another friend. Her two children got interested in the process and started helping [...]

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First Ladies Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush had adventurous culinary tastes when they were in the White House. Their husbands, not so much! This is according to the man in charge of preparing for them everything from simple family meals to elaborate State dinners.
Walter Scheib was the executive chef at the White House from 1994 [...]

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After this weekend, the farmers will pack up and head back to their farms until spring, leaving us city dwellers awaiting in cold anticipation the first tender lettuce leaves and asparagus shoots.
I never in a million suburb-dwelling years thought I would look forward every Saturday to going to a farmers’ market. But I have. There’s just [...]

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If you haven’t been to Blackberry Farm lately, you haven’t been to Blackberry Farm. That’s the message Blackberry’s proprietor, Sam Beall, brought to a packed house last week at the Knoxville Museum of Art.
The event was a fundraiser for the museum’s guild, but it also was a celebration of the launch of “The Blackberry Farm [...]

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Officials at the Knoxville Museum of Art are both angry and saddened by a graffiti attack that has disfigured the wall surrounding the museum’s sculpture garden.
“It’s horrible,” said David Butler, the museum’s executive director. He said the same kind of markings have defaced several other buildings in the nearby Fort Sanders neighborhood. “It happens in [...]

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Our friends Dawn and Richard Ford love holidays. They love holidays so much that if there is not a holiday when they think there should be one, they invent a holiday. Case in point: Apple Day.
Apple Day started when their son, Christopher (who is now in his mid-30s), was about six years old. Dawn and [...]

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If, as the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the folks at the Market Square District Association are feeling pretty darn flattered.
That is the group that came up with the idea and launched the “First Friday” program six years ago. It’s a simple concept. On the first Friday of each month, many shops [...]

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Why do a bunch of hard-charging career women gather once a month to play a game that, by definition, is 100 percent luck and requires no skill whatsoever?
Beats me. But we started doing it a year ago and we love it. It’s Bunko, of course. We rotate hostess duties so each person has it at [...]

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“In writing about ordinary people, you’ll find the extraordinary.”
So says Rheta Grimsley Johnson, a syndicated columnist whose work has been running in the Knoxville News Sentinel for 27 years. Her column is in about 50 other papers as well.
Johnson was in town last week speaking at the Friends of Literacy Writers Hall of Fame at [...]

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