So, yeah, opening a coffee shop feels a little crazy and stressful right now. And, to be honest, I have had my moments of questioning myself and some pretty serious mom guilt. Coffee shops don’t just come together by themselves — I worked 9 hours on Christmas Eve away from my family to help get this together.

We have told you a lot about the Buttermore Building in Harlan, from how Geoff first envisioned it as a coffee shop in 2016, to becoming owners in 2017, to spending a tough 2018 getting it renovated. We left the story off in the spring of 2019, with a beautiful but empty building. We still wanted that coffee shop, but we knew we would have to wait and apply for financing. The startup costs of a coffee shop were not in the picture. And then we suddenly found ourselves with all the equipment we needed.

The University of the Cumberlands is doing something completely innovative in downtown Williamsburg – something that is very different from the way universities located in communities struggling with poverty typically provide support – that I really want to tell that story and help bring it to the light.

Today we observe National Miner's Day and salute all of the people who work and have worked in the mines. We are proud of our town's coal heritage, which is why we included a tipple in our name and logo. Today we reflect on the sacrifices, honor the accomplishments, and remember the tragedies that our hard-working coal miners experience.

As much as we love the Buttermore Building, the truth is that we almost had to walk away from the project, and 2018 was nothing if not a hard candy Christmas. In that stretch of time, we faced some very difficult times financially, but we also went from having a building in Harlan that was nothing more than a roof to one that was fully operational with bathrooms, HVAC, and electric. Let me tell you the next step in the transformation of the Buttermore Building to the Moonbow Tipple.

This Christmas, we want to make gift-giving easy. We want you to feel good about what you give, both because it is an awesome and unique qift, but also because your money is goint to a real person. Our Moonbow gift guide will help you pick out great items that are geared towards folks around here.

What an absolutely lovely day we had Sunday at the Moonbow Christmas Fair! There is so much to share: our vendors, who represent the best-of-the-best regionally; the turn-out, which certainly exceeded 1,000; and, of course, the great team here at Moonbow that made it happen.

Every now and again, art manages to capture Appalachia’s duality so perfectly that the participant is left breathless. And that is just what happened on Saturday night at the Cornbread Convocation through both food and theater.

It is such a good feeling, because it is the ultimate way to shop local. You get all of the fun of holiday purchasing without any of those nagging doubts. You get more than an item, you get the whole story of it — how it was made, who made it, where it came from. In a society where so much of what we touch is mass-produced and sold in a big-box store, it is a true balm for the weary soul in a season that can feel commercialized and disconnected from it’s true meaning.

You could say that our love of rural communities is in our blood. My family (Sky speaking here) stretches back generations in Eastern Kentucky, and Geoff (my husband) grew up on the Mesabi Iron Range in Northern Minnesota.