Schuylerville Public Library News

Join us on Saturday, December 21st between 11am and 2pm. Meet Santa and pose for a quick photo! And take home a treat and a free book or two!

Registration is required and will be for a half-hour window. Please try your best to arrive within that time frame to help us avoid overcrowding. Caregivers do NOT need to register.

Hosted by The Advocates for The Schuylerville Public Library

A generous patron has donated $500 to our Library's Building Expansion & Renovation Project fund and will donate another $500 if our community will make 25 individual donations between Dec 3 (Giving Tuesday) and Dec 21, when Santa comes to the Library. Help us fill Santa's Sleigh to unlock this exciting gift!!

There are many ways to give. Check them out here: bit.ly/turningapage

Suggested minimum donation of $25

As many of you have already heard, the library is looking to expand our physical space to better serve our community. Financial and community support is needed in order to make our dream of a better-sized facility a reality. The photo above is a rendering of what the completed expansion would look like. The blueprint to the left details what features and spaces our library will include after finishing the renovation.

There will be a public vote in 2025 for the community to decide if they are ready for the Library to move forward with this expansion. Additionally, the Advocates for the Schuylerville Public Library will be fundraising for the project with a financial goal of $200,000.

With 56 years since our last capital campaign and major expansion, we understand how significant this change is. When it was completed in 1968, our current building was built to serve just over 1,400 residents. After transitioning from a Village Library to a School District Library in 2013, we now provide service to just over 10,000 residents. Our goal has been and continues to be to serve our community to the best of our ability, and our greatest limitation to that at present is our physical space.

• December 24th for Christmas Eve
• December 25th for Christmas
• Close early at 4pm on December 31st for New Year's Eve

Let’s close out 2024 and welcome 2025 in a deep and meaningful way! Presenter Susan Meyer will share her tried and true system for releasing the current year honorably and supercharging your vision and intentions for the upcoming year. This isn’t about making “resolutions”. It’s about getting in touch with and honoring the dreams living inside your heart and midwifing them into the world. Reflective questions and guided inner journeys will help you to get clear on what matters most and create a monthly infrastructure to help you stay true to that throughout the year.

This popular, fifth annual series is presented through Schuylerville Public Library and consists of five sessions. The initial meeting will be held on Sunday, Dec 29 at 7pm via Zoom. The following sessions will all be held on Wednesdays at 7pm via Zoom.

Session 1: Reflecting on & Releasing 2024 (Dec. 29)

You will be guided to reflect on and release the year, unwrap the wisdom and “dark gifts” of the challenges you encountered, celebrate your personal strengths and accomplishments (large and small), generate self-compassion, and make peace with your experience of 2024. This session is an important one that helps you to compost and integrate the residue of year that’s ending before moving into the New Year.

Session 2: Setting Intentions (Jan. 8)

This powerful session will help you to get clear on what matters most. From there, you will begin to set intentions and aspirations aligned with your vision of who you want to be, what you want to do and manifest, and how you want to feel. You will receive inspiration for creating artistic expressions of your deepest aspirations.

Session 3: Identifying Your Resources and Superpowers (Jan. 15)

This session focuses on resourcing and resilience! As the envisioning process continues, you will take inventory of the inner and outer resources you can call upon to uplift and support you when the going gets tough or things just don’t go as planned

Session 4: Getting Organized and Mapping It Out (Jan. 22)

This is where we put it all together. Learn how to turn a regular planner into a magical, motivating, manifesting tool, and create your own, personalized organizer to house your intentions, resources, inspiration, reminders, etc. so they’ll be easily accessible.

Session 5: Staying on Track (Jan. 29)

In this session, you will put in place a system of setting monthly intentions and responding to end-of-the-month reflections, to keep you aligned with what matters most as the year progresses.

Managing our own mental health, our physical health, and importantly our stress levels can be improved by getting a bit creative. Researchers have found that 75% of your cortisol levels are lowered during 45 minutes of making art. When you create art, your brain is focused on what you are creating, which tends to clear your mind and is similar to meditation, becoming a time for self-care and relaxation. Join us on Friday December 13th at 6pm to create some art in order to help reduce stress.

With this program, we aim to:

• Be mindful - Engaging in creative activities can promote mindfulness, which can help reduce stress levels. Focusing on the present moment and the creative process can help reduce anxiety and promote relaxation.
• Find a distraction - Creative activities can be a healthy distraction from stressors and worries. Engaging in a creative task can help shift the focus away from negative thoughts and promote feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction.
• Enter the 'flow state' - Engaging in creative pursuits can trigger a flow state, a state of complete absorption in the present. This mindfulness pushes worries and anxieties to the background, promoting relaxation and lowering stress levels.
• Encourage self-care - Engaging in creative activities can be a form of self-care, promoting feelings of self-worth and self-esteem.
• Help structure your time - Creative projects can provide a sense of purpose and structure, helping to reducing anxiety about time management, giving you something to look forward to and providing a consistent plan for your brain and body to reduce stress built up through the day, week or month. Foster social connection - Participating in group creative activities or sharing one's art with others can promote social connection and reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Are you interested in going to college or going back to school? Perhaps looking for a new job or feeling unsettled in your current career? On the second Tuesday of every month between 5:30-7:30,

allow our library staff to help you in a one-on-one, half-hour appointment.

Support we can provide: help editing/updating resumes, assistance using college application and job websites, clarifications when filling out applications, taking career assessments.

Registration is required. Use one of our computers or bring your own device.

December 6th at 6pm - Family Movie Night showing "The Garfield Move"

December 15th at 6pm - Family Movie Night showing "The Polar Express"

Feel free to bring your own drinks/snacks to movie night, there will be popcorn provided.

Book Club is done for the year but will begin again on January 22nd at 7pm. Our first book of the year is William Landay's Defending Jacob. Check out the graphic below for the rest of the year's picks!

If you would like to participate, come by the library and pick up a copy of the book, we have them on hold about a month before the meeting. Registration is not required. We hope to see you there!

Cookbook Club has no meeting in December but we will be having our cookie exchange on Thursday December 5th at 6:30pm! Registration for the cookie exchange is required and can be found here.

If you are not currently a part of cookbook club, but are interested in being on our mailing list, please fill out this form. You can also feel free to make a dish and come by! Our first meeting of the year will be on January 15th at 6:30pm and our theme is all things Ina Garten. The library has many of her books available to check out for inspiration.

Shorts and Stouts, our partnership book club with Bound by Fate Brewing will be meeting on November 21st at 5pm. Our story for December is "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which can be found here. Come join us for lively conversation, excellent beer, and delicious Laotian food at the Bound by Fate taproom!

It's a new month, with a new opportunity to learn a little bit about our staff. Each month we ask the SPL staff a question. This month we asked, "What is your favorite tradition that you and/or your family does during the holiday season? "

Caitlin: "My favorite is our Christmas morning brunch and mimosas after the gift opening craze ends. Then we make sure Ralphie gets his Red Rider."

Julie: "One of our traditions is to treat ourselves to jigsaw puzzles with a charcuterie board and egg nog."

Holly: "I think my favorite holiday tradition is putting up the tree with my daughter and husband. Most of my decorations are the same ones I had from when I was a child, so it's always nice to walk down memory lane."

Emilly: "We celebrate Festivus 😊"

Jessica: "Jammies, Harry Potter Marathon, comfort food, try new recipes, board games."

Beth: "On the day after Christmas (aka Boxing Day) we usually sit around in our PJs, read a new book, and enjoy leftovers from the last few days. It's a great way to de-compress after all the cooking and cleaning and socializing associated with Christmas."

Brandi: "One of our family traditions that we celebrate is Jesus's Birthday! We have angel food cake for desert and sing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus on Christmas Eve.

Another Yearly Tradition is taking a picture of our cat Noxx in the tree. His favorite tradition. You can see last year's tree picture above and to the right."

Mary Lou: "It is always great to get together with family and friends throughout the holiday season, which I clock as Thanksgiving week through New Year's Day. It is busy, but January through March can be long months with not a lot to do, so I just go for it during the holidays!! Lots of fun things to do, people to see and catch up with, lots of mania if you want it, and of course rewriting those New Year's resolutions that you really are going to do this next year!!!!

Monday - Friday 10am-8pm

Saturday 10am-2pm

Email: svl-director@sals.edu
Website: https://schuylervillelibrary.sals.edu/
Location: 52 Ferry Street, Schuylerville, NY, USA
Phone: 518-695-6641
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SchuylervillePublicLibrary/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/schuylerville_library/