The blaze dominated headlines at the start of December while the investigation into its cause was underway.

On December 3, officers from the Central West Police District announced a 23-year-old had been arrested for the crime.

On December 6, a 15-year-old girl became the second person charged over the blaze.

Orange then shivered through its coldest December day in 11 years. The mercury only just cracked double figures on December 2, the coldest start to summer in Orange in over a decade.

More importantly, the cold conditions arrived with a welcome 14.6mm of rain.

A good news story made the front page on December 7, when an army corporal surprised his wife by returning from a six-month stint in Iraq early.

James Sutherland showed up unannounced at the family home, to meet his week-old son. Mr Sutherland took to Facebook to praise his wife's resilience during the nine months they've spent apart this year.

"I've had to make some sacrifices in life this year to get a deployment overseas, but no one has sacrificed more than my wife. PS. I'm at the front door," he wrote.

On December 8, about 50 people met in Cook Park to launch a local Extinction Rebellion branch, urging Orange City Council to declare a climate emergency.

East Orange residents woke to billowing smoke on Monday December 9, when an early morning inferno gutted an auto electrics company closing William and sections of March street.

The building with signage for, Canobolas Auto Electrics, contained a number of tyres as well as vehicles and mechanical equipment.

On December 13, the countdown officially began for when the first medical students walked through the gates of Charles Sturt University in February 2021.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, alongside representatives from CSU and joint partner Western Sydney University, turned the first sod on the $22 million medical training facility.

Work began on the site in August, to demolish the previous building before construction work could start on the Academic and Research Hub, which will also house the $22 million School of Rural Medicine.

It is expected the building will be ready by November next year, in time for the first medical students in February 2021.

Santa arrived a couple of weeks early on December 14 when Orange hosted its annual Carols by Candelight singalong event at Northcourt.

Water shortages continued to dominate discourse around the region, with the front page story on December 19 revealing Orange residents were paying carters to bring water from Blayney to fill their swimming pools and water their gardens.

One carter told the Central Western Daily he was making several trips a day and had increased his capacity from one truck to two to keep up with demand.

We ended the year with bushfires ravaging the state and dominating the pages of the paper.

On December 20, motorists travelling over the Blue Mountains faced commuter chaos with Bells Line of Road still closed thanks to the ongoing Gospters Mountain blaze.

Fire crews completed a backburn at the Orange Resource Recovery Centre on December 21, after green waste and mulch at the tip self-combusted starting a fire.

The year ended on a high and a low with the announcement on December 30 that the Hotel Orange would reopen but the McCormack Baber New Year's Eve fireworks display would not go ahead.