It wasn't supposed to be this river cruise. We wanted to explore the wines of Portugal. Instead, we found the Rhine, the Moselle, and castles!

Treat yourself to a nighttime stroll through the Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site on December 11th from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. We will offer free self-guided first floor tours of the Rayburn family home where you can see a Christmas tree, holly and tinsel, a crackling fireplace, and listen to some holiday music.

Create your own paper ornaments or build a paper bag donkey or reindeer in our Visitor Center, where you will also find some sweet refreshments sponsored by the Friends of Sam Rayburn.

Scrape leftover food items into the garbage. Have leftover cooking oil? Pour into a separate container and dispose in the garbage - - not down the drain!

Celebrate the holidays with Vitruvian Lights at Vitruvian Park in Addison! On Saturday, Nov. 29, the magical wonderland with more than 1.2 million sparkling LED lights wrapped around 468 of the park’s trees will host a special event featuring fun for the whole family. At 6:00 p.m., Dallas String Quartet will take the stage, playing a fusion of fun holiday classics as well as pop and rock staples on both traditional and electric strings. The musical group has performed for former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as for the NFL and NBA.

More than 1,600 guests filled the sanctuary at St. Andrew Methodist Church in Plano on November 12 for a remarkable night of teaching, inspiration, and celebration as world-renowned theologian and author N.T. Wright delivered the inaugural lecture in the new Dr. Scott L. Engle Lecture Series.

1924 – Edwin Hubble's discovery, that the Andromeda "nebula" is actually another island galaxy far outside our own Milky Way, is first published in The New York Times. Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as "nebulae" were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way. He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable's luminosity and pulsation period (discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt) for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances. Hubble confirmed in 1929 that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from Earth, a behavior that became known as Hubble's law, although it had been proposed two years earlier by Georges Lemaître. The Hubble law implies that the universe is expanding. A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher had provided the first evidence that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities. Hubble's name is most widely recognized for the Hubble Space Telescope, which was named in his honor.