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If you want to know all the things going on around Portland for Christmas, here’s the best guides:

TravelPortland Guide

Portland Holiday Events

Portland Christmas Guide

Portland Christmas Guide 2024

Portland Holiday Events: Bazaars, Shopping, Christmas Lights, Local Markets

PDX Monthly’s list of holiday and light displays and events in and near Portland: https://www.pdxmonthly.com/arts-and-culture/best-holiday-lights-displays-near-portland

Starts late Nov:

• Nov. 29 to Dec. 30 – Christmas Festival of Lights at the Grotto
• Nov. 22 to Jan. 5 – Portland Zoolights/Brewlights
• Winter Wonderland – Christmas lights at Portland International Raceway
• Hillsboro activities
  • Downtown tree lighting
  • Ice Skating and winter village at Orenco
  • Lightopia at Hillsboro stadium – KOIN
• Pioneer Courthouse Square Tree Lighting
• Holiday Food & Gift Festival
• Vancouver
  • Holidays on Franklin – complete with live entertainment, Santa, and blowing snow

Dec:

• Dec. 15–31 Peacock Lane Christmas Lights
• TUBA Christmas Concert
• Christmas Ship Parade
  • Tualatin Ship Parade and Sauna+Solstice party
  • Milwaukie Solstice and Ship viewing
• SantaCon – though now there are multiple competing groups and none are even remotely as interesting as the original Cacophony Society ones late 90’s early 2000’s.
• Pittock Mansion Holiday Display
• Benson Hotel Gingerbread Masterpiece

Comical googly eyes have appeared on statues and murals around the city of Bend, Oregon in December. The city has asked residents to top adding them since it costs money to remove them safely without damaging the art, but one Facebook user responded with “It would cost $0 to leave them on”

Article:

• https://news.sky.com/story/us-city-tells-residents-to-stop-sticking-googly-eyes-on-its-statues-13273478

In the ‘you can’t make this stuff up’ department, a stripper who was apparently having a mental health crisis at the local Casa Diablo vegan strip club stabbed the DJ 4 times in an apparent random attack – nearly killing him.

The DJ Duncan Allen was rushed to the hospital, underwent multiple hours-long surgeries, and is currently recovering at Legacy Emmanuel Medical Center.

Peyton Lathan, the stripper that stabbed him, was found by the police hiding in bushes alongside the road. During her arrest she said she is “pleading insanity”. She will be arraigned on her indictment Tuesday morning.

Article

• https://www.kptv.com/2024/12/14/portland-dj-hospitalized-after-being-stabbed-by-stripper/

Liz McCarthy, an Oregon Health Authority epidemiologist, released the finalized overdose data for 2023 and it shows a tripling death rate since legalization and harm reduction efforts were passed. Even worse – the rate is increasing dramatically with a doubling rate of almost every 2 years.

Even worse, most of the rest of the country are seeing a dramatic DECLINE in overdose deaths – so this is clearly a local/policy problem.

The newest numbers show 1,833 people died in Oregon from a drug overdose last year, compared to 1,383 in 2022, 1,189 in 2021, 824 in 2020 and 626 in 2019

This increase mirrors the same timeframe of drug decriminalization and hundreds of millions spent on harm reduction efforts in Oregon. The tripling of the overdose death rate in the same time is yet one more data point that proves that legalization and supposed harm reduction efforts do the very opposite.

Dramatically more people are dying now than even arrest and jail time. Jail was actually saving more lives than legalization and harm reduction.

Anyone that has compassion for the plight of drug addicts should demand change of policy. The sad reality is that many Oregonians continue to support these ideological policies when it’s clear they’re killing hundreds more people every year.

Articles:

• https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2024/12/oregon-overdose-deaths-grew-33-in-2023-health-data-shows.html

Despite record spending of up to $500 million per year ($531 million in 2023 alone), Oregon’s homelessness is becoming even worse. In fact, it’s the worst in the nation. Oregon is now #1 in rate of homeless families.

Axios reports that Oregon’s rate of unsheltered homelessness among children is 19.9 for every 10,000 kids, according to the report, which relied on point-in-time survey data, a census count conducted on one night.
The second-ranked state, Hawaii, had a rate less than half that of Oregon, with 7.2 of every 10,000 kids experiencing unsheltered homelessness. The national average was just 1.4.

Article:

• https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/12/06/homeless-families-children-shelter-women

I found out that the Prost brewery here in Portland hosts a free annual Thanksgiving meal. They ask for volunteers to help serve and offer the food free. That’s pretty cool.

Find other free and cheap things around Portland here.

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Hailed as a way to break up the 2 party system, encourage more moderate candidates, and improve voter engagement – Portland embraced ranked-choice voting. Despite it having been tried in numerous locals since the early 1900’s – it has often been later repealed. So how did it work for Portland?

There were 2 ranked choice selections this year: your district city council member and mayor. Each had nearly 20 candidates. An entire front and back page of the ballot were just those 2 races. Unfortunately, it appears the exact opposite happened with regards to engagement.

Despite getting up to 6 total rank votes and having 19 candidates, 1 in 5 voters who cast ballots chose no one for Portland city council which was far more than in the previous two city council election cycles. For mayor, 11% of returned ballots didn’t vote for any of the 19 mayoral candidates compared to 6% in the previous 2020 election. In short, voters almost doubled the rate of leaving a position blank.

What was interesting is that Portland had between 50-85% voter participation, with many districts in the 80% range – which is very encouraging.

However, I do think Ellen Seljan summed up my own experience.

“My overall conclusion is that the voters were overwhelmed, found the system and number of candidates too hard and didn’t feel confident in their vote choice,” said Ellen Seljan, a political science professor at Lewis & Clark College. “The easier thing to do is to skip those races entirely.”

I can confirm it required a TON more work sifting through the nearly 40 candidates for the 2 offices. I didn’t skip any races, and did rank all the folks I was interested in. It exhausted me enough I did it in chunks over a few days.

Sadly, many of the candidates were clearly fodder: single issue candidates, extreme candidates, completely inexperienced candidates, and unknown candidates. Too many didn’t submit statements or have a website. We had one candidate that wanted to tear down/convert city infrastructure to bring back horses and let homeless help manage them. Another guy was an unemployed legal student living in his parents basement (his own words).

I think the big failure is the lack of information – critical information. With no other info, I found myself looking some of the people up in LinkedIn or checking if they have a criminal record. You have to do all that vetting yourself – a dangerous lack of information as many voters likely don’t have that time.

Oregon Live has more interesting charts and data:

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2024/11/portlands-ranked-choice-debut-causes-voter-engagement-to-crater-1-in-5-who-cast-ballots-chose-no-one-for-city-council.html?gift=b5be0308-e613-4099-ace9-f5de966b4b63

“There is one girl here who they are trying to get her out of here. She has tried to stab me twice and I filed reports on that”

“The problems with this building happen to be TPI moving in drug addicts who are not rehabilitated, and need to be rehabilitated, but they are not.”

In the past month, there have been two homicides in front of the the Home Forward Louisa Flowers building in the Pearl – and an egregious animal abuse case caught on camera in their elevator. The building has graffiti on walls and windows. Residents report apartments that smell of fentanyl, unwanted guests are often found in the building, and residents shared multiple photos from inside of trash piling up in the hallways and stairwells.

The response?

On Thursday the building leadership had a pizza party for all residents where they invited case workers and other community resources to connect with the residents. Home Forward workers said they hope to ‘foster strong, supportive networks among the residents,’

Sounds like exactly like the kind of comically ineffective plans we’ve come to expect when dealing with homicidal residents, serious drug addiction, and a quickly deteriorating living environments in Portland. Instead of experts coming in to deal with serious drug addiction and violence – we’ll have a pizza party and talk about it. Meanwhile, animals are being abused openly, fentanyl is wafting around the building, and other residents are having their lives threatened on a daily basis.

Sadly, this is what happens time and again when largely untrained non-profit employees (non-profits who are switched out every time the money runs out) try to deal with very serious criminal and drug abuse issues in Portland.

Articles:

• https://www.kptv.com/2024/09/13/lloyd-district-apartment-residents-raise-concerns-over-safety-security/