Weird Christmas Greetings and What’s Coming in 2026!

Happy Holidays, one and all! May the the season and the New Year, especially, find you all well and ready to welcome in new and exciting things for 2026.

As for us at Friends of the Old West End, we are looking at some big transformations and the broadening of our scope and ambitions.

First of all, as you may have noticed, I’m back in the writer’s chair. After a bit of an existential crisis, I took a leave of absence and then decided that this is where I belong, after all. My apologies for the uncharacteristic wishy-washiness, but I did make some creative and executive decisions of my own. More on that in a minute.

In the mean time, the website is getting a much needed upgrade, and we hope to have that up and running sometime in January. With that decision to upgrade, some reconsideration about our content became necessary. As you may or may not know, we are funded by the city, and this year’s contract required us to finish the inventory of historical sketches on the houses. With that single-minded focus, we fear we’ve lost the interest of many of our readers and that our posts (and my writing in particular) have become somewhat stale and monotonous. We would therefore appreciate some input from you, if you will, on what we should be writing about in the months to come.

To that end, we hope you will take a moment to fill out this short survey. Please select the one thing you would like to see more of. Can’t choose just one topic? Write your multiple answers in ranked order in the comment field at the bottom. You can also email us at info@oldwestendva.com.

The city’s funding of our organization and of this website and newsletter (and my writing) will end this summer, and so we are currently searching for grants and other funding options to keep the blog alive. You may see a little donation button appear on the website and in the blog posts in the future. In the event you feel inclined to send a few dollars our way, we would be eternally grateful.

We are also considering expanding the board and taking on additional board members as we look to the future and to widening our scope. Our events take a lot of manpower, and with the attention focused on community (where it should be) and on tourism (we hope), we’ve let other aspects of running a non-profit fall to the wayside. Some of us are doing many jobs at once. If you’d like to join us and lend your talents and skills to the effort, send us an email at the address above and someone will reach out to discuss what we are looking for and if you might be a good fit.

This year will see the return of Old West Porch Fest in April, so stay tuned for more information on that as well as a really big and exciting announcement about the use of the green space on Pine Street.

As for my writing, I’ve decided to take on a massive project that I’m hoping to share with our beloved readers. As you may or may not remember, back in 2020, as the Covid Pandemic was beginning to threaten lockdowns, I wrote a piece about a patent medicine man who used to live in Danville. That story has continued to intrigue me, and the mystery, the more I have learned about it, just gets deeper and deeper. And so I’ve decided I’m going to write a longform piece on that subject. In what form, whether non-fiction, creative non-fiction, or historical fiction, I haven’t quite decided, but as the research is proving to be just as interesting as any book would be, I want to share that process with you. And so, starting in January, in addition to my usual posts, I’ll include my research as, piece by piece, I put together the puzzle that is the true history and life of one of Danville’s most interesting, eccentric, and enigmatic historical figures, The Great Nanzetta. (One of the posts this week is some research I did in order to prove who he wasn’t) “Prince Nanzetta” as he sometimes styled himself, appeared in Denver, Colorado in 1902 claiming he was the last descendant of Montezuma, and at the time of his death (allegedly by his own hand) in 1930, he had been indicted by the state of North Carolina under the alias of Jacob Cohen, a Jewish Russian immigrant with a wife in New York and four children. What the truth of his origins is and was may never be completely and certainly known, but I’m determined to learn all I can in the meantime and to illuminate a lost piece of Danville folklore in the process.

We at FOWE are looking forward to a bigger, brighter, and better year in 2026, and we hope you’ll join us as we celebrate this place we call HOME. Thank you for your faithful readership, and happy New Year to you one and all!

Sincerely,

V.R. Christensen and the board of the Friends of the Old West End