MARK YOUR CALENDAR

John Greenleaf Whittier is busy this December. Not only is this the poet’s 204^th birthday month, but his friend Longfellow is visiting, he’s holding an open house, and there’s a reading of his bestselling poem “Snowbound.” Check below from a calendar of Whittier events in his hometown of Amesbury, MA. (Continued below)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

On Tuesday, December 6, at 7pm, The Music Hall’s Writers in the Loft series will welcome the award-winning New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik. The author of Paris to the Moon will join the series with his new nonfiction work, THE TABLE COMES FIRST: Family, France and the Meaning of Food. His appearance will take place at the Music Hall Loft at 131 Congress Street in downtown Portsmouth. (Continued below)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Shakespeare’s beloved comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will opens on the traditional twelfth day of Christmas. Replete with magic, romance and joyful pranks, there is also an underlying sense of mystery beneath the laughter as Feste the Fool cautions: “What’s to come is still unsure…”  The show runs January 6 to 22.  (Continued below)

Singer-songwriter Tenley Westbrook and the FreedomSong Foundation will present her Christmas for The Troops 2011. The live concert will be held on Saturday, December 17 at 1 pm at Bethany Church, 500 Breakfast Hill Road, Greenland, NH. The concert will be viewable live at www.tenleywestbrook.com and is being produced by Living Proof Media Group co-founder Scott Harris. (Contined below)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

December 9 - 11, Pontine Theatre’s co-artistic directors, Marguerite Mathews and Greg Gathers, present its original Toy Theatre adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol. The program also includes an original staging of Jimmy Scarecrow’s Christmas adapted from a short story by 19th century Massachusetts writer, Mary Wilkins Freeman. (Continued below)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

The NH Historic Agricultural Structures Advisory Committee will sponsor a free session, “How to Read Your Barn,” on Friday, February 3 at 9 a.m. during the 2012 NH Farm & Forest Expo.  The Expo will be held in the Frost/Hawthorne Rooms at the Radisson/Center of New Hampshire in Manchester. (Continued below)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

The second annual Festival of Trees will take place on Friday, December 2 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at the Dover City Hall Auditorium. The focus of the event will be 25 elaborately decorated Christmas Trees on display that will all be up for auction.  The event will also offer raffle prizes, local choral performances and a special visit from Santa Claus. (Continued below)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Writers on a New England Stage welcomes author Chris Matthews to the stage on Friday, December 2, 2011 to discuss his latest book JACK KENNEDY: Elusive Hero. The acclaimed host of MSNBC’s Hardball, Kennedy expert, and New York Times best-selling author masterfully presents a full picture of JFK’s life and presidency through interviews and firsthand accounts from people who knew the famous president. (Continued below)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Gary Sredzienski, known affectionately in his southern Maine hometown and beyond as the “Creek Man,” will take to Rockland Harbor's frigid waters in December to raise funds for the nonprofit American Lighthouse Foundation, located at 464 Main Street in Rockland, Maine, and the foundation’s local chapter, the Friends of Rockland Breakwater  Lighthouse. (Continued below)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

After nine months of hard work, flying sawdust, hundreds of trunnels, gallons of paint and sealant, miles of cotton and hemp oakum – the new gundalow under construction at the Puddle Dock Shipyard on Strawbery Banke is ready to launch. “This will be the first wooden boat launched out of Portsmouth in nearly thirty years,” says executive director Molly Bolster. (Continued below)