“The MUG Event Calendar” is short on entries but long on holiday cheer as the Christmas holiday approaches.

Parties, pot luck dinners and festive get-togethers dominate the schedule this week, with a few groups trying to stay serious with Q&A sessions and presentations on Motion, a photo contest, Dashboard and some of OS X Lion’s cool new features.

“The MUG Event Calendar” can be found at The MUG Center (http://www.mugcenter.com), an online resource for Mac User Groups. MUGs are good places for making new friends in the Mac community, improving your computing skills, finding solutions to technical problems, and perhaps locating a good deal on used hardware. For more info on MUGs, and to find the location of the one nearest you, go to Apple’s MUG page (http://www.apple.com/usergroups/).