THE YEAR IN THEATER: Most years, it’s tough to look at the theater (or movie, or music, etc.) landscape and find a real large-scale trend running through it. But this year, one point was obvious to Lawson Taitte. “The big news on the local theater scene this year was the way all our midsize theater companies rose to the same kind of consistent excellence that leaders like the Dallas Theater Center had shown in recent seasons,” he writes in his wrap on the year that was on dallasnews.com. A cool photo gallery accompanies his list.

THE YEAR IN THEATER II: For it’s year-end package, Theater Jones has asked local luminaries to write essays about what they saw in the scene. First up is Shakespeare Dallas artistic director Raphael Parry. And while he writes some about the year in Shakespeare, he also spends a lot of his essay looking back at his experience directing Diamond Dick: The Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 in Dallas and New York.

A JOYFUL NOISE: Did you take part in last night’s Unsilent Night in downtown Dallas? It’s a pretty simple concept – revelers load up one of four tracks on a music player and take a walk though the city streets with others feeling the holiday spirit. The event originated in New York and is the brain child of Phil Kline, who hosted the first Unsilent Night 20 years ago. “Advent is about expectation and longing, and I started by asking how that applies to somebody in the big city who, like so many of us, comes from somewhere else,” Kline told nytimes.com after New York’s Unsilent Night last weekend. “You can be alone here in the middle of eight million people. I felt somehow with music I could put something into that void.”