Holiday surprises....

.... both happy and sad.

We went to a dinner party last night at our around-the-corner friends V and S. V's house is always over-the-top Christmas-ed up, except this year V decided not to put up a big tree because her son and his big dog are visiting. V doesn't want to take a chance that A's puppy-ish dog will knock her tree down or damage her Radko ornaments.

Aside from the empty space where V's tree always stands, their house had a touch of Christmas in every nook and cranny, every corner, every spot as far as your eye could see. V's collection of Santa figurines must number over a hundred, no two of which are alike.

V's dinner was purely southern-- roasted chicken legs, country ham, green beans cooked with potatoes and ham hocks, cornbread, dirty rice (white rice cooked with sausage, so the end result is "dirty"-looking rice), and cold cucumber salad.

Between dinner and dessert, V asked me if all the ladies at her party could walk over to my house to see our trees and all the other holiday decorations. So out we went, bundled up in sweaters and shawls because the temperature had dropped from nearly 80 degrees to close to 60 after the sun went down.

V really misses not having a real tree in her living room, and all her little table-top trees look as pretty as they always do, but the tree filled with her half-price sale collection of Radko ornaments just makes V's Christmas very special. She has been here twice so far to look at our big tree, and I would imagine she'll continue to walk from her house to mine every time she needs a Christmas-tree fix.

So the happy surprise was a nice dinner party at V's house...... the sad surprise is the hospitalization of another friend and neighbor-- J had to put her 13-yr-old Yorkie to sleep just a couple of days ago, and she hasn't been feeling right since then. J has a heart problem to begin with, and once she began popping those nitroglycerin tablets, she knew it was time to call the ambulance and get herself to the hospital.

They're keeping her there for a couple of days, giving her tests to make sure her heart palpitations were due to the stress from the loss of her beloved little dog, and not because she needs another heart operation.

This hospitalization of our neighbor J comes right after the death of another neighbor, whose body just gave up and gave out after a hospital stay resulting from back problems and cancer operations. When we saw B's obituary in The Chronicle, we had no idea he was so active and well-known in this community. B always came to our parties, and his humility was very heart-warming... we read the article about his very active life with awe. And for all these years, we thought he was just a very nice older man who loved his dog and his cats and baked the best chocolate cake in the neighborhood.