We already love that the Denver Public Library’s changing, themed, free Fresh City Life programs always include a cooking series from season to season, offering culinary tips, demonstrations and samples for every local closet gourmet worth a dash of salt. Fittingly, in a fledgling new year marked by the need…

Master printer, teacher, artist, retailer – Patricia Branstead is all these things, but since she relocated here from Steamboat Springs and opened her tiny but fabulous emporium of handmade papers and printing supplies, Kozo (a Best of Denver winner last year), her focus seems to have been on building the…

You gotta have music at Christmas, because it ain’t Christmas without it. But you, like most everyone else, have already decided that you might explode if you hear even one more rendition of “Frosty the Snowman,” anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Relax. There are holiday music programs for every taste this time…

“Even the poorest cottage welcomed the festive season with green decorations of bay and holly — the cheerful fire glanced its rays through the lattice, inviting the passenger to raise the latch, and join the gossip knot huddled around the hearth, beguiling the long evening with legendary jokes and oft-told…

Into the rush of the holiday season, some sorrow must fall: I just got the news that local bead-sprite Joy Barrett is closing her Studio Bead boutique in Highlands Square at the end of the month. “I thought that the shop might be a platform for building something bigger —…

The PlatteForum formula — teaming a professional artist with at-risk youth to build a unique art show that showcases the work of all — never seems to go wrong. Without losing a beat, PlatteForum’s Judy Anderson finds artists who are not only enormously talented, but who also inspire in rare…

Muddy Waters on the Platte, better known simply as Muddy’s, first opened its coffeehouse/bookstore/theater in the block of 15th and Platte Streets in the late ’70s. In a time that was intrinsically different from our modern era, whether you looked at it from the left or the right, Muddy’s was…

In these parts, Christmas on the slopes always has a nice ring: the powder, the icicles, the lights and the nightlife – they’re all part of the total holiday experience that Colorado’s mountain resorts work overtime to help create. But there’s nothing more spectacular than a torchlight parade down a…

The holiday season is rife with traditions: trimming the tree, kissing under the mistletoe, sitting through The Nutcracker for the umpteenth time, and for the ultra-hip of Denver, reserving a seat once again for The SantaLand Diaries, the Bug Theatre’s annual staging of the David Sedaris yarn about his stint…

Being Jewish, I do suffer from a touch of that inevitable holiday-season alienation. But I can always count on the Boulder Arts and Crafts Cooperative’s annual Judaica Show, currently in progress, to make me feel at home in the midst of a sea of Christmas trees and creches. Absolutely the…

Love music, but don’t believe in Santa? What about that rigmarole about the manger and the three kings? Is that nothing more than a good yarn to you? Sound Circle feels your pain. Once a year, the 21-voice Boulder women’s a cappella ensemble riffs on the seasonal themes brought forth…

It is so: Sometimes grown women in the 21st century like to dress up like grown women from the turn of the last century, all decked out in frilly, bell-shaped gowns and modest, lace-fringed blouses, with layered petticoats, satin hair bows, parasols, kneesocks and, oh, maybe a pink wig topped…

Eric Matelski, artist and self-proclaimed “art pimp,” is effusive when touting the Wax Burner Prayer Candle Art Show, a group-show concept first tried out in Chicago last fall and now making its second appearance here in Denver, featuring more than 120 works in all. But he was into prayer candles…

Some think a dove flies over the holiday season: It’s the time of year when we think about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, and we really mean it. Julie Davis and her friends at the Swallow Hill Music Association picked up on that peace-and-love vibe several years ago…