(We recommend clicking on the arrows in the lower right-hand corner of the slideshow to watch this in full-screen.)

If you’ve ever poked around in the children’s section at the Penrose Public Library downtown then you may have seen a little locked glass cabinet full of lovely, out-of-print children’s books. We had a feeling they might have a wonderful edition of Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas. And indeed they had several: one illustrated by the inimitable Arthur Rackham (which, sadly, was missing most of the color plates) and the other illustrated in 1954 by Roger Duvoisin, author and illustrator of books like Petunia and Donkey-Donkey. Perhaps most famously, Duvoisin illustrated The Happy Lion, which was written by his wife Louise Fatio.

We thought it a rare treat to get to see this book and thought we’d share it with you in a slideshow with a dramatic reading by TBS Producer Noel Black’s son, Ursen. The music is “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” by Tchaikovsky from the Nutcracker. Many thanks to the Pikes Peak Library District.

Happy Holidays to you from The Big Something and we’ll see you next year!

In the short seven months since The Big Something began, we have produced 152 posts, which include over a hundred produced features. We’re proud and hope you’ve been enjoying it. We also hope that The Big Something has, in some small way, changed the way you see the Pikes Peak Region.

Here are KRCC General Manager Delaney Utterback and TBS Producer Noel Black’s five favorites (it was hard to choose!) from the past year respectively and we’d love to hear your favorites in the comments. Thanks for a great year!

Delaney’s Top 5:

1. Boxatron.

2. Hair Wreaths

3. Shoegazer Grafitti.

4. A Tour of the Towers Atop Cheyenne Mountain.

5. Faces of Pride.

Noel Black

1. Planet Alley: The Strange and Distant World Behind Your House.

2. A Bad Day For Mickey: Mousetraps from the Pioneers Museum

3. Roy Linton’s Mischievous Posters

4. A Naturalist’s Guide to Gas Rigs.

5. Penny Arcade Song Contest Winners. (Click HERE for a link to the original request with a slideshow of beautiful stencil art from the arcade games.)

Your favorite DJs list their favorite music of 2009. It’s all been conveniently tabbed by Mr. Spock and fluffed with some bonus YouTube videos for your viewing pleasure. Best of all, any of the tracks you buy with the iTunes links next to the songs help support KRCC. All you gotta do is CLICK HERE.

(click on the “captions” in the lower right hand corner of the slideshow to see the names of the photographers)

Since we started The Big Something in June we’ve been asking readers to submit photos to our Flickr pool and featuring them in our daily emails with the idea of providing alternative views and visions of the Pikes Peak Region that go beyond the clichés. As we wrote when we started the pool:

A big part of the way we see ourselves as a community comes through the pictures we take and share. Few would dispute that Pikes Peak and Garden of the Gods would be among the first images to come to mind when you say “Colorado Springs”; or that old steel mill smokestacks would come to mind if you say “Pueblo” and so forth. What we would like to do with our KRCC Flickr Photo Group is to create alternate visions of our region. And we want you to help us do it!

And that you have! Thanks so much to all the photographers who’ve been regular contributors. The slideshow above represents what we believe is the distillation of the first six months of this project and offers what we feel is a more rounded vision of the region. While the photos are not “the best” per se, they are among the most telling and compelling of what we had in mind. We set the slideshow to “I Wonder Who We Are” by The Clientele from their album Bonfires on the Heath, a favorite among our DJs this year.

If you’d like to join our Flickr pool and have your pictures conisdered for our picture of the day in the daily email, you can go HERE.

(We greatly appreciate your support this year! Please let us know what you love and/or what we could be doing better for you in the comments section below or by email: thebigsomething@krcc.org. Thanks!)

(Photograph of Theolnious Monk © 2009 The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith.)

If you listen to Morning Edition on Sunday mornings you may have already heard the first installments of the The Jazz Loft Project Radio Series, a multi-part radio documentary about Life Magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith’s loft in the flower district in New York City in the late 50s and early 60s. Along with his incredible photography, Smith also obsessively recorded thousands of hours sounds in the loft including many jam sessions by the best jazz musicians of the era (including Thelonious Monk’s rehearsals for his famous 1959 Town Hall concert).

The series has been airing in condensed version at 8:50 on Sundays for the past three weeks and will continue for the next seven weeks. We encourage you to tune in to these condensed installments.

For those of you jazz and photography fans who would like to hear the complete series, however, beginning in January, KRCC will air the complete multi-part radio documentary during Dick Fairley’s Jazz Excursion on Thursday nights from 8 to 10 p.m.

I worked on the project in New York last year at WNYC and it’s an incredible example of documentary radio production and story-telling by Senior Producer Sara Fishko. Stay tuned for more details and read more about the Jazz Loft Project HERE.

…or even if you didn’t, you can listen to the whole performance again HERE at Colorado College’s website.

KRCC would like to thank The Colorado College Cultural Attractions Fund, The Gazette, Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church, The Pikes Peak Gay and Lesbian Center and The Civilians for helping make this possible.

We would also like to thank all of you who came out to see the performance during the cold snap and helped us collect 20 boxes of non-perishable food for Care and Share.

(All photographs by Michael Myers)

On the surface, Colorado Springs Artist and Orthodox monk Luke Shaffer would seem to be the embodiment of spiritual contradiction. On the one hand, he’s a bona fide tonsured monk in the Orthodox tradition. On the other hand, he’s a child of American pop culture who continues to draw and paint the rock ‘n’ roll icons of his youth alongside the monks and icons of his faith.

In this second installment of a two-part audio slide show (to watch part 1: Punks, click HERE), Shaffer talks about the paintings, drawings and icons he’s created of the monks and saints who changed his life.

Shaffer’s work will appear at the Rubbish Gallery from January 8 – 29.

(Many thanks for your comments and feedback below! thebigsomething@krcc.org)