It's Boxing Day!

 RHYS BOWEN: Wishing you a happy day after Christmas. Did Santa bring you what you wanted?

IN England and Commonwealth countries it’s Boxing Day. This has nothing to do with the sport. It was the day when employees got their Christmas boxes. Specifically servants in big houses who had to work all of Christmas Day for the family and were allowed home to their own families the day after. They were given a box of food, clothing and maybe a money gratuity to take with them.

When I was growing up in England the tradesmen would call at the house to wish us the “compliments of the season.” And they’d get a tip. The garbage man, mail man, window cleaner, newsboy etc.

Who had a good Jolabokaflod? I've wanted to try that but with this many people around it's not possible. Sounds ideal, doesn't it?

So did you have a good day yesterday? We had a full house with fifteen family members, a big brunch with mimosas and bloody marys, tea with mince pies and then turkey and ham and all the trimmings. So today we can barely move.  We’ll have another big brunch and then a turkey curry. And play a lot of silly games and laugh a lot. Bliss!

But I wanted to share a couple of unique things about our Christmas:

Traditional food, apart from turkey etc, is small mince pies and sausage rolls. These are from my childhood. When I was growing up the other treats at Christmas were tangerines (that only appeared at Christmas time, dates and turkish delight.

Who else has a kangaroo on their tree? (Outside of Australia, I mean?)  

You may not know that I met and married John when I lived in Australia. My brother came down to join me and my parents retired to Australia, so for years my whole family lived there. Now my brother still lives in Tasmania and every Christmas I get Aussie ornaments for the tree. So I have an emu, and echidna, koalas etc etc leaping all over my tree. Such fun.

I also have two large bears by my fireplace. They came from the house of a dear friend who passed away.  When her house was put up for sale I managed to buy two of her bears. They are  called Nigel and Stanley. Nigel is the superior one who is singing carols.

He is quite critical of Stanley who is simple and loveable and taking toys to poor children.

Apart from those my tree is decorated with stars, hearts, angels. I love it.

And I'm sending blessings from our house to yours! Love, Rhys.

The House Next Door

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: So listen to this. We have lived in the same house near Boston for the past twenty-something years. We love it, it's peaceful, and in a little town with a town center, and green and wonderful. And it has ducks. So. Our next door neighbor on one side is a dear pal. And on the other side is a perfectly nice couple we see walking their some kind of dog.

But next door to that is a big big house with kind of mysterious inhabitants. In that there seemed to be lots of them,  with too many cars and too much clutter in their back yard.  We never approved.

Anyway. the other day woman who looked like me with a cute dog showed up at the front door. (Her name turned to to be Meg, and her terrier Bowie, and she's lovely. A new pal.)

Anyway. She said: I need to tell you there's a new neighbor in the big house! And he wants to cut all our trees that have branches that hang over his yard!

Here is our back yard, the view from Meg's house.

The tree he wants to cut is a 200 year old sugar maple. Here's a closer shot, and we think it's about 60 feet tall. 

But look at the photo below.  See the branches to the left of the lines? We think... he wants to cut them all. (We have called our own arborist, the one who has taken care of our trees for years, and he is coming tomorrow to trim as much as we can. Crossing fingers.)

A situation is about to ensue. But I really hope not.

Can you believe it? Don't get me started. I will be so so incredibly sad if that fabulous and historic tree gets chopped up. I love it, every day. In winter, in spring, in summer and the fabulous fall. It it a hobbit tree, I know, and has birds and squirrels and everything.  We LOVE the tree. It is an ancestor.  It was here..in the civil war. Oh. I cannot bear it.  We are trying to make this work. I hope we can compromise.

So do you know your neighbors? Did you when you were a kid? How neighborly are you?

RHYS BOWEN: We have lived on the same street since 1980. There are still some original neighbors and the new ones are friendly. We have a Halloween party every year ( with plenty of alcohol flowing after kiddies are in bed) and summer street parties, we are very friendly with our next door neighbor. Only one horribly creepy family nearby. 

We knew everyone when we had a condo in Arizona, and we've met the neighbors at our new house . They are sweet people. I'm a naturally chatty person so I speak to everyone!

HALLIE EPHRON: We do know our neighbors and are SO LUCKY with them. On one side, a State cop (he parks the cruiser in our shared driveway... better than a burglar alarm!) and his lovely wife (a teacher) with two grown kids we've known since they were babies. When enormous maple tree in our backyards precisely on our property line needs pruning, we share the cost. 

On the other side a couple just moved in with a new baby. They wanted to take out the hedge between their driveway and our front yard and replace it with a fence. We said GO TO IT! (one less hedge to trim) We also know our neighbors across the street and up the adjacent dead end where our grandkids race their scooters. 

I LOVE my neighbors! But it hasn't always been so (cue scary music)... 

LUCY BURDETTE: let me put it this way, I want to love my neighbors. When we were growing up​,​ we lived in ​a​ neighborhood te​e​ming with children and friendly people. There were block parties and bridge parties and kids roaming everywhere and nobody worried. 

In fact, stranger than fiction, our next-door neighbor Mary Jane  married my dad when he was widowed many years later. It was wonderful to have a stepmother who knew us as children!

We live in two places​. I​n Key West things are always changing. People get older and can’t stay there, transient tourist​s​ move in and out and so on. (People have actually died--I hate that!) But we do have a nice group of people in our condo whom we visit with and could call in an emergency. In Connecticut, well, how shall I say this? Some of the neighbors we know well and love. With others, situations​ have already​ ensued. It’s a small neighborhood and we are hoping for the best when we go back this summer. Fingers crossed, okay?

JENN McKINLAY: We adore our neighbors! In fact, we just had dinner at one of their houses last week, along with our other neighbors, and it lasted about seven hours because we all genuinely like each other. Our neighborhood is old, the houses small, but it's full of kids and families, and we live on a street with a school at the end so there's plenty of activity but in a good way. 

When the hooligans were young, I had no problem them tossing them out of the house to "go play and see you at dinnertime" because I am a free range mom, who thinks the best part of childhood is the shenanigans. I am happy to report the hooligans got up to plenty. I think the thing I love most about my neighborhood is that I feel safe. Everyone knows each other and we all look out for each other. Hub and I have been contemplating moving as the hooligans leave the nest, but it will be hard to say good-bye to our home of twenty plus years.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: On the plus side, we love our "historic" neighborhood, with its town square, historic houses (some of them), and beautiful trees. And as our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter live next door on one side, we count ourselves extremely lucky in that neighbor department. It's a very mixed neighborhood age-wise. There are young couples with babies either side of our kids, there are middle-aged people, retired people, and some very elderly folks who have been in their houses for decades. I think our catty-corner neighbors are in their nineties. And our former across-the-street neighbor stayed in her house until she was a hundred. We still miss her.

BUT. There was a huge, heritage, at least a hundred-year-old native elm tree just on our new rear neighbor's side of our shared fence. It was glorious, maybe the biggest tree in the whole town, and we have some serious trees here. It shaded our entire back yard, patio, deck, and the west side of our house from the afternoon sun. I loved that tree in every season for almost twenty-five years.

In February, the neighbors informed us the night before the tree crew started that they were cutting it down. I was hysterical. I mean, literally hysterical, and I'm not normally given to emotional outbursts at all. I begged them not to do it. (We'd always shared the cost of maintenance on the tree with the previous neighbors, who were friends.)

But the tree is gone--it took them four different crews to finish the job, and the crews had to work out of our back yard to get it down. It was a devastating loss.  Now, not only do we have no afternoon shade, we no longer have any privacy in our back yard. We're in the process of seeing if we can put up shade sails to give us a little relief on the deck and patio.

HANK: Oh, Debs.. that is horrific. Ridiculous. Amazing. Breathtaking. And so so so scary. WHY??  
(And bizarre coincidence, I am no reading a terrific book by the amazing Louise Candlish, called THOSE PEOPLE. It's wonderful. And guess what it's about?) 
What about you, Reds and readers? Are you lovin' thy neighbor? Or...not so much?