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Twelve Days and the New Year


 

I can’t overlook the work that went into Columbia Association’s “Twelve Days of Christmas”-themed series of videos. You shouldn’t either. It starts here.


Image from CA social media


It has taken me a while to realize why I find this photo slightly eerie and this morning I figured it out. This is not the Lakefront stage as we know it, but rather an image of things yet to come. With added holiday embellishments. It’s giving me Uncanny Valley vibes but you may feel differently.

The rest of the videos show CA doing what they do in real life and I have been enjoying them. You can see the full set (they're not quite done yet) on their Facebook page or on Instagram. *

I’m sharing this because 1) they went to a lot of work and 2) I think there continues to be a kind of ignorance or general misunderstanding or disconnect about what various local institutions do. 

It used to be that people had no clue what was CA vs. what was Howard County Government. Now I’ve seen examples where people don’t seem to know the difference between Howard County Governent and the Howard Hughes Corporation.

Oh, bother. 

While many decisions we care about involve the interaction of CA, HoCoGov, and Howard Hughes, this does not mean they are the same entity. That would be much like looking at your entire family plus significant others around the dinner table and saying they are all the same person. 

If you have ever tried to get said assembled group to agree on a take-out order you know how ridiculous such an assumption would be. 

On the other hand…

When we look at initiatives such as the Downtown Library I see plenty of folks basing their arguments on a sort of assumption that all these groups are independent silos engaging in some kind of epic battle for dominance. This view fails to understand the collaboration and inter-connectedness between parties such as the Howard County Library System, the Howard County Schools, HoCoGov, CA, Howard Hughes, The Mall in Columbia…

I’m not going to make a Venn diagram for you and I’m not claiming their overall goals are identical, but there’s a good deal more overlap in mission than many people seem to understand. Feel free to like certain institutions more than others. That’s up to you. But if folks could try to learn more about where they intersect, well…that’d be great.

And while we are at it, the use of the word “developer” to mean “instrument of Satan” has really ramped up again lately. I take a dim view of the practice of spewing unverified characterizations online. Honestly, this serves only to stir up general animosity. This kind of “we all know that developers are___________” looks a lot like “Catholics eat babies”, “the Irish are drunks”, and so on. 

It’s ignorant, mean-spirited, and ugly. 

But…I guess it’s human nature to seize on one thing and decide it’s the problem. Everything will be solved if we just get rid of that thing. Friends, another thing embedded in human nature is our ability to be wrong. We are oh, so fallible. So what happens if we spend an enormous amount of time fighting the One Bad Thing and it turns out that we were wrong?

Okay, that’s depressing. Let’s close with this: also embedded in human nature is the ability to choose to learn more and do better. 

Do you hear that, 2026? 


Village Green/Town² Comments 




*They may be on TikTok but I don’t check there anymore.

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  1. Julia A. McCreadyDecember 22, 2025 at 4:44 AM

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