This Week

Traditional yuletide fun will be the order of the day for Small Town Christmas next Saturday, November 30, in Downtown Clarendon.

After a day of supporting local merchants during Small Business Saturday, the Small Town Christmas festivities will begin at 4 p.m. with the 200 block of Kearney Street being closed off to traffic and vendors and booths being set up in the holiday spirit.

Registration for a Christmas Scavenger Hunt will begin at the Courthouse at 3 p.m. with the hunt beginning at 4:00. The walking hunt will consist of ten teams of four – first come, first serve – with at least one team member being high school age or older. A knowledge of local history will be helpful, and cell phone will be needed for selfies. Chamber Christmas Cash will be awarded to the winning teams.

Santa’s Playhouse will open at 321 Kearney, across from the Aquatic Center, with crafts and games for kids. The playhouse will continue through 8 p.m.

At 5 p.m., Santa Claus will be on the Courthouse Square where there will be live music on the courthouse steps and hot chocolate provided by the Clarendon Lions Club. The courthouse lighting will be held at 6 p.m., and then the fun will shift back to Kearney Street.

Food vendors will be set up on Third Street, and live music and caroling will continue throughout the evening until 9 p.m. Carriage rides will be available, and s’mores stations will be set up on Kearney Street. Merchant booths will be set up on Kearney Street and/or in the Donley County State Bank parking lot between the Masonic Lodge Hall and the Crossties Ministry Center. In the event of bad weather, those booths will be moved inside those buildings.

Small Town Christmas is being organized by a group of volunteer elves and supported with promotional efforts through the Chamber of Commerce and the Clarendon EDC. Volunteers have been busy preparing decorations and cleaning windows. The group cleaned windows on Kearney Street from US 287 to Third Street this past weekend and will continue in the 300 block on Sunday and would welcome any help.

For more information, visit ClarendonTX.com/Christmas.

As part of a national day known as GivingTuesday, the local Donley County Community Fund (DCCF) is participating in The Panhandle Gives campaign.

For nine days from November 25 through December 3, all funds raised locally will be increased through a match from the Amarillo Area Foundation.

“Participating in this campaign is an opportunity for our local fund balance to grow,” DCCF chair Jacob Fangman said.
The DCCF is a local board whose purpose is to raise money for a perpetuating fund while contributing a portion of the money to local organizations.

Over the past eight years, the DCCF has been able to give $9,000 to local charities while increasing its own fund balance, thanks to support from county-wide residents.

Contributions can be mailed to Donley County Community Fund, c/o Jacob Fangman, Box 906, Clarendon, TX 79226. Checks should be made out to The Panhandle Gives, with DonleyCCF written on the memo line.

Other board members are Shauna Herbert, Sherol Johnston, and Roger Estlack.

As part of the annual drive, the Mulkey Theatre will host a special screening of Jim Carrey’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” on Sunday, December 1, at 6 p.m. Admission for the movie will be a donation to the DCCF.

So that the local DCCF can benefit from the match, anyone wishing to participate will need to give their donation by Monday, December 2, so that the final deposit can be made on GivingTuesday.

GivingTuesday is a movement held annually in all 50 states on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving to kick off the holiday giving season to demonstrate that every act of generosity counts towards giving back to local communities and the causes they support.

Local merchants and the Clarendon Chamber of Commerce are planning to make shopping at home pay off during Small Business Saturday and throughout the holiday season.

The third annual “Shop Small” promotion from the Clarendon Chamber of Commerce will put a grand total of $550 in Chamber Christmas Cash in the hands of lucky winners who shop with local merchants.

Sign-ups at participating merchants will begin Friday, November 29, for drawings that will be held for $100 each Friday on December 6, 13, and 20. To enter, shoppers will fill out an entry at local participating merchants. The Chamber will gather them up each Friday morning, and hold the drawings live on the Chamber’s Facebook.

Enter as many times as you shop locally, so shop often. Entries stay in the hopper each week, so those who enter will have multiple chances of winning.

The Chamber will also hold a bonus drawing for $250 in Chamber Christmas Cash on December 20. Sign-up for the bonus drawing will be held starting December 2 at the Clarendon Visitor Center. Shoppers can bring their receipts and receive one entry for every $25 spent at the participating merchants.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the participating merchants include Broken Road Liquor, Broiller’s Auto Parts, Cornell’s Country Store, Country Bloomers Flowers & Gifts, Courtney D’Costa Scentsy Consultant, Lowe’s Family Center, Monroe’s Peach Ranch, Mulkey Theatre, Mike’s Pharmacy, the Whistle-Stop, and Wicked Fast Attire. More businesses were signing up this week, and a full list will be updated at ClarendonTX.com/Christmas.

Chamber members wishing to participate can call the Visitor Center at 806-874-2421.

Several downtown merchants are also making plans to stay open for Late Night Shopping on Thursdays, December 5, 12, and 19, until 8 p.m. That list is still being finalized, but merchants do have plans to draw for prizes during those Thursday nights.

For other activities, see the separate Small Town Christmas article in this week’s Enterprise.

Shop at home this holiday season and remember the important role your local merchants play in keeping your community strong.

Visit the Chamber’s Facebook page or ClarendonTX.com/Christmas for details on which businesses will be open.

By Ted Harbin, TwisTed Rodeo

At just 23 years of age, Cole Franks has accomplished a great deal in the world of rodeo.

Three seasons ago, he won the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association’s bareback riding and all-around championships while helping Clarendon College to the men’s team national title. He then became the Resistol Bareback Riding Rookie of the Year, advancing to the National Finals Rodeo for the first time. He finished third in the 2021 world standings. A year later, he was back in Las Vegas, where he finished fourth on the money list.

He returns to the NFR for the third time in four years this December with a lot of goals on his mind, but there’s one that sticks out.

“I want to be at the South Point after the first round,” Franks said, referring to the casino and resort that hosts the nightly Montana Silversmiths Go-Round Buckle Presentation. “I want to be at the buckle ceremony getting that buckle.”

That’s one of the things that has alluded him; he’s been close, but he has yet to stake his claim to a round win in Sin City. He’s competed 20, earned almost $300,000 in two trips the ProRodeo’s grand finale, but there are more things he wants to accomplish. Go-round winners not only earn a shiny new buckle and a bottle of Pendleton Whisky, they also collect the lion’s share of the nightly payout.

All those things add up, and when dollars are piled on top of one another, the ultimate goal is the world championship. That is earned by the contestants in each event who conclude the 10-day championship with the most money won through the season. There are 135 cowboys and cowgirls who will challenge for rodeo’s gold in Las Vegas, and only a handful will grab it.

For Franks, just making it back to the NFR is a case of redemption. He finished the regular season with $139,556, good enough for eighth in the bareback riding world standings – only the top 15 on the money list advance to the Nevada desert. This comes a year after earning nearly $110,000 and finishing 17th.

“This year has been a little bit about revenge,” said Franks, who still lives in Clarendon. “I almost feel like I’m going to my first NFR again. I’m a little amped up. I’m excited o be going back.”

He should be. He won close to $150,000 in each of his previous trips, so he understands the opportunities that sit before him over 10 December nights.

“I didn’t want to be sitting on the sidelines watching the finals again,” said Franks, the son of Darla and Bret Franks, the latter of whom qualified for the NFR three times in saddle bronc riding and is the rodeo coach at Clarendon College. “I want to be behind the chutes watching, getting ready to ride. I did a lot of stuff different this year to make it happen

“Not being there last year was the key to me being there this year. I was not going to miss out. I don’t want what happened last year to happen again, so you got to see a lot more fire in me, or at least I tried to have more fire.”

He made sure it showed by finding the pay window a lot. While he didn’t have a lot of victories, several of the titles he won came at big stops. He considers his biggest to have been at Salinas, California, where he won nearly $15,000. It was just the starting point to a mid-July week that paid him more than $22,000 and propelled him up the standings.

It was just part of a transition season for the young bareback rider. After kicking off his career with world champions Tim O’Connell and Jess Pope, Franks adjusted his traveling posse to 25-year-old Louisianan Waylon Bourgeois and 20-year-old Texas firecracker Rocker Steiner, a three-time NFR qualifier who leads the world standings heading into this year’s championship. The key ingredient for all is seeing a progression in their talents.

“I feel like my riding has changed quite a bit, even from this past winter until now,” said Franks, who credits a big part of his success to his sponsors, Cinch, Pete Carr Pro Rodeo, Western Legacy Co., 287 Ag, Eliason Trucking and KN Double Cone Ranch. “I feel like my riding always has to change. Every year, we’ve got these new guys coming in, so everybody’s changing.

“Everybody’s faster. I know for sure I was a lot more conservative at my first NFR, and now, I feel like I can flash it up a little bit better than I used to be able to do.”

That’s important. Bareback riding is judged on a 100-point scale, with half the score coming from the animal. If a cowboy can help the horse earn more points, then the overall score will be better. The difference between first and second in Las Vegas can be half a point, and but the pay contrast is thousands of dollars.

He sits in the middle of the pack in the standings, but there’s not much difference between him and Richmond Champion, the 15th-ranked bareback rider in the field. There is a big gap between Steiner, who has earned more than $233,000, and Franks. Once they all arrive in Las Vegas, though, all that is out the window. Franks can catch Steiner in less than four nights if everything goes his way.

“I’m a little more jittery going into this one, like I was when I went the first time,” Franks said. “That first year, I was just so excited to be there, and I really didn’t know what to expect.
“I was so nervous I don’t even remember the first round. I feel like once I get there and once everything starts going, it’ll kind of be back to how it was my second year.

“Of course, if you’re not nervous doing this, there’s something wrong with you, especially at the finals.”

Sales tax revenues for Clarendon slipped in November when Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar delivered monthly allocations last week.

Clarendon’s revenue of $52,736.12 this month was down from $61,362.03 one year ago at this time. The city is still ahead for the calendar year-to-date, up 1.07 percent at $473,040.17.

Hedley was up considerably at $4,358.95 compared to $1,697.73 last November. Hedley is now up 42.08 percent for the year at $17,225.33

In Howardwick, sales tax revenues were up 8.45 percent to $2,097.38, but the lakeside city is behind for the year, down 5.69 percent at $19,373.26, largely due to lowering its sales tax rate in the fall of 2023.

Statewide, Hegar delivered $1.2 billion in local sales tax allocations for November, 1.1 percent more than in November 2023.

These allocations are based on sales made in September by businesses that report tax monthly and on sales made in July, August and September by quarterly filers.

Shop Small and support local businesses Saturday, November 30, in Clarendon with a great line up of fun, sales, and activities.

Visit local merchants all day in celebration of Small Business Saturday. Then starting at 4 p.m., enjoy the fun and festivities in downtown Clarendon, featuring Santa at the Donley County Courthouse at 5 p.m. and the Courthouse Lighing Ceremony at 6 p.m. followed by food trucks, music, games, a scavenger hunt, and more More details coming soon.