Ready … set … color! Our annual Christmas Coloring Contest returns for another year in next week’s Franklin County Times, so we hope all young artists across the county are getting ready to grab their crayons and show us their best work.

We launched this colorful competition in 2020, and it’s been a holiday hit among local children. Franklin County children love a good contest, whether it’s a Farm-City essay, a 4-H poster, a rocket launch or a fundraising challenge.

Next week will bring the first coloring page for this year, and a different page will appear each week through Dec. 13. Children through age 12 will have four chances to show off their artistic skills and enter to win a cool prize.

Plus, EVERY entrant will receive a free box of crayons and a coloring book.

Local business sponsors help us make this contest possible for the community each year, and they have our gratitude during this season of joy and thankfulness. We hope you will show them your thanks, too, by patronizing their businesses during the holidays and in the year to come. This is what it means to be a community – mutual support and positive connection.

Don’t let the children in your life – whether that’s your own children, your grandchildren, the next-door neighbors or those church youth – miss the coloring page each week as “the holidays” begin in earnest. We’ll have plenty of extra copies of the paper at our office in downtown Russellville as well as in paper boxes throughout the county. There’s no purchase necessary for children to enter.

Let’s get coloring!