This being the Thanksgiving week of the Falls Church News-Press’ 25th anniversary celebration year, we are eager to share with our readers our sincere and heartfelt sense of joy and thanksgiving for having had the wonderful and wonderfully challenging opportunity over the last two dozen-plus years to participate in the life of this community of Falls Church and its environs.

Who would have thought that on Thanksgiving week 1990, three months before the very first edition of the FCNP rolled off the presses, that after all this time, the ritual of gathering the news and advertising, assembling it and providing it for our printer to print and then our distributor to deliver, that this process would still make up the bulk of each and every week for us?

Taken as a whole, it has been a total delight, for especially but not limited to our founder, owner and editor, who has been at this since “Day One,” and who still has hanging above his desk a faded copy of the “Benton Star” that his mother saved for him from when he produced his first newspaper on a hectograph (who knows what that is?) at age seven. His quip about still producing newspapers after all these years has remained, “Either I was born with printer’s ink in my veins, or I have just never grown up.” Always, too, the reply has come, “Probably a little bit of both.”

He also often says, “One of these days, I am going to have to get a real job,” but he really hopes not. “I am still having fun,” he frequently says. We do everything in our power to make working for the paper a happy experience for everyone else here, too.

We are thankful for our many friends in this community, for those who have given us moral and spiritual support and their best wishes.

We are thankful that we have never swayed, never from “Day One,” from expressing our core values that place investing in the education and development of the young at the top of our list, and at encouraging sufficient economic development to help pay for the best that our quality school system can be. That has been the long and the short of it all along.

People have been at odds with our editorial decisions over these years, and we are glad that we’ve always provided such persons with ink on our pages to share their views.

We believe that now, we hold Falls Church to be a better place than when we found it. It is hard to fathom that anyone born or living in Falls Church since 1991 has never known this community to be without its weekly paper, delivered each and every Thursday. It has become a given, even though for us, it has always been contingent on doing the work to bring each edition to pass.

Indeed, for all this, we’re thankful.