With Thanksgiving just a couple of days away, it won't be long before the end of another year is upon us.

That means it's once again time to start thinking about our year-in-review packages for both the print edition of The Citizen and online at auburnpub.com.

Last year, we enhanced our annual summary of the 10 biggest local stories of the year with a special year-in-photos section, and we received a nice amount of good feedback. We plan to do both this year, and there will be plenty of material to sort through.

If you have some thoughts on what made the biggest stories of the year, please send me a note.

In making our choices for what stories make the list - and how we rank them - we're trying to select the events that had the biggest impact on the community. Which issues had people talking the most? Which resulted in major changes? Which ones brought people together? Which ones divided them?

We'll put it all together in a special report on Sunday, Dec. 27.

Now on to a few other items of interest as we head into the holiday season:

€ Our Thanksgiving Day paper will be packed with those always-popular store circulars.

This edition is one of our biggest sellers of the year, and I'm sure a lot of it has to do with people's interest in what big bargains will be offered first thing on Friday morning. And since most of us have Thursday off, it's just nice to have a fresh newspaper to read and share with the rest of the family.

In addition to the circulars, we'll be featuring a front-page package with local retailers' thoughts on the upcoming holiday shopping season.

€ Our Web site has recently launched a new weather section that offers significantly more information, in a format that's easier to read and navigate.

You can get an instant look at the current temperature and conditions in Auburn by looking for the weather summary near the top right corner of any page on our site. Click on that summary to get a full report that includes an hour-by-hour and 10-day forecast, live radar maps, reports for major cities and even a ski report.

All of this can be found by going directly to auburnpub.com/weather. For those of you only interested in conditions on the slopes, try auburnpub.com/skireport.html.

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's columns appear Tuesdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net