Has anyone ever lived in one of those small, Hallmark style US towns?

[BabyLlamaZen]

I know it's not real, but I do have a guilty pleasure watching them all around Christmas. Think 'My Christmas Inn', 'Christmas made to order', that sort of thing.

The romantic in me loves the idea of swooping into one of these gorgeous towns, (local hunk on hand of course!), set up my own coffee/bookshop, that kind of thing. Live at the local diner.

Has anyone actually stayed in one of these places or know what they're really like?

Id move to north america but for the wildnerness and stuff, and id have to be loaded.

@user1471565182

Full of meth, heroin and racism.

This is also how my FiL describes living in the “chocolate box” Cotswolds.

I live in a British version! I've only ever lived in this area so haven't experienced the flip side. We speak to everyone as we pass, I pretty much always bump into someone I was at primary school with and know who not to give information to as the next day it will be village gossip! I love just knowing that if we have any problems there will be people to help out. I enjoy the community.

That's how I imagine Hallmark World to be, but with more handsome single men and homemade pies.

I lived in, and my grandmother is from, a place called Chester, Nova Scotia. Loads of movies & TV shows have been filmed there (Two If By Sea, Haven, Shipping News, etc, I've sat on the shore an watched them Elizabeth Hurley and Sean Penn filming a movie, Mel Gibson had a house there, etc my grandmother met Errol Flynn back in the day ) it is the quintessential New England small town.

It's a typical small town really, but with a massive divide between the rich summer people and the year round locals. Lots of gossip, racism, etc (the local hotel is particularly well known for having asked Martin Luther King Jr. & his wife to leave so he didn't upset the white guests).

There was an actual petition put around by the summer folk to stop Tim Hortons building a branch on the main road because it would ruin the esthetic.

Not much drug abuse that I remember...just the usual hash and weed.

Very pretty but when I left I never looked back...

@namechange84 Wow that's terrible, so people have no choice about how they present their home and garden? I couldn't live like that.

I lived in a Boston suburb that looked like that. But the underbelly was not great. Rich people in one enclave full of dysfunctional relationships , where high earning husbands supported a bunch of SAHMs who tried to fill their boring days with oneupmanship on decor, catered lunches. Having an English nanny was the done thing. I met a lot of them and while they were all nice girls, I don't think their employers realised that a Leeds accent wasn't what they had in mind . And these girls were exploited terribly.

No public transport , so constantly in car to ferry kids to school and activities. No shops , etc within walking distance. I was viewed suspiciously walking around the neighbourhood- mainly to gawk at houses.

These people were serviced by workers , gardeners, cleaners that lived in very different neighbourhoods.

The other side of the coin is that when I lived in UK , I thought it would be like Coronation Street where everybody knew each other , worked locally and hung out in the pub.

I'd love to live where Chesapeake Shores takes place. And that house by the water...

Also...there’s quite a dirth of decent eligible men despite the Hallmark narrative. The best ones settle down very young.

Well in these movies the hunk would normally be a widower or perhaps have been away working as a high flier but returned home on search of his more simple life of childhood....

I'd love to live where Chesapeake Shores takes place. And that house by the water...

Vancouver island. Incredibly expensive and the average age of the people living there is 70.

Not lived in, but visited many times disputing our 40 trips to florida.
In fact my daughter got married there, in mt Dora
About 40 miles north of Orlando.
We loved it.
It was so quaint
Not even a macdonalds
Haven’t been for 10 years now.
I wonder if it’s changed

Disputing= during

Go look at Marblehead (MA), Brattleboro (VT) and almost the entirety of Cape Cod. They do exist and they aren't racist enclaves. Honestly.

Also...there’s quite a dirth of decent eligible men despite the Hallmark narrative. The best ones settle down very young.

Oh god yes. There are definitely no attractive eligible young men. The "good ones" from mine left and never looked back, same as me. The one's that are left are not good, not smart, and not attractive (unless mulleted gas station attendant is your type).

DH grew up in ilfracombe and although not a quaint American town it still has a little of the everyone know everyone vibe. The very long high street is still full of independent shops and lots of them although a few chains have crept in. MIL has loved there her entire life and as she has run the Playschool for 40 years literally knows everyone so wherever we go with her people stop to say hi. The kids when they go and stay with her have had random people stop them and say ‘you must be DHs kids’ and even MIL hasn’t always known who they are. There’s always random events happening, jumble sales and sponsored this and Easter egg hunts etc.
It’s pretty on summer with the seafront and all the little summer shops open. It’s depressing and boring in the winter and most people live in the pub. There’s no proper good jobs for miles, and a lot of seasonal unemployment.

@Dowser

Not lived in, but visited many times disputing our 40 trips to florida. In fact my daughter got married there, in mt Dora About 40 miles north of Orlando. We loved it. It was so quaint Not even a macdonalds Haven’t been for 10 years now. I wonder if it’s changed

Got followed and mugged by a drug addict in Mount Dora in one of the quaint arcades! It’s pretty but it was one of those places that we weren’t welcome everywhere due to not being white . But it is somewhere I’d consider Hallmarky!

namesnamesnamesnames Very limited choice. Certain people in the community got tetchy about the silliest things, like little windmills in the planters, or wind chimes on porches. If you got a new fridge and the empty boxes lay for a few too many days in your own screened back porch or lanai and were visible then you might find yourself with a citation. It was a bit like school uniform rules but instead of piercings, hair lengths, acceptable school colours, it was acceptable porch decor, grass length and paint colours. All of the houses had to look uniform and the community had to portray a certain way of living. It’s weird when the experience is SO different from the vast majority of the UK but when you live in a US community you just accept it. It’s a different way of life. Some communities are gated, so you have to have a reason to get in at all if you are a non resident. Some of these communities feel or give the facade of being safer as they aren’t open to the public. When you experience the difference in US areas where anything goes and it can feel quite unsafe then it’s understandable that some people would rather live in a little community with strict rules. I think they see it as a small price to pay for peace of mind.

@NameChange84

Yep, the HA where I lived was so strict.

It’s not a Housing Association like what you have in the UK as a form of social housing, it’s a Homeowners Community Association who dictate the rules of a housing development or community.

We’d get in trouble if our grass grew an inch over the acceptable height for our residential community. Or if we let visitors in the community pool or tennis courts. There was a list of acceptable paint colours for the exteriors of the houses. We were only allowed one style of roof. Someone got fined for having a windmill style decoration in their outdoor planters as it “wasn’t in keeping with the community” (because someone thought it was tacky), you weren’t allowed to park on the kerb. Parking on the grass in front of your own home could lead to eviction, even if it was a roofer’s van or something. It was an utterly insane set up.

When we bought our house in kissimmee we particularly went for one that didn’t have a housing association.

But yes, what you say is true. My uk friends moved InTo Celebration, classed as the Disney town.
I must admit it did look very pretty with its clapperboard style housing.
The rule book was inches thick apparently and yes certain house colours only were allowed.

Our housing community , was literally just that.
No schools, shops or doctors. Everything was a long hot walk away, or you needed a car.
In fact, if you were seen walking alongside the main road ( 192) you were really seen as an oddity..or british 😂

In the Florida mall, in Orlando , I was asked where I lived and when I said lindfields in kissimmee, she said ..oh you’re out in the country.
Had to laugh as we were surrounded by lots of houses, as far as the eye could see.although we would be plagyed with raccoons raiding the bins, Turkey vultures looking out for armadillos.
On our way back to the airport, we took the sand road at the back of the community to avoid the traffic on the 192 and just the width of a car door away from me was a bald eagle dtood on an armadillo having his lunch.

So, yes I guess we were in the country after all.

I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts that often features in films. The front door lock broke when I was 5 and we never fixed it. When I moved to London I often left the door unlocked because I wasn't used to taking keys. DH was then my boyfriend and completely horrified. When we went home to visit my family they all recognised DH from the 10,000 photos my mother had shown them and all came to say hi. It freaked him right out. He's used to it now but it took a while!

Stars Hollow looks perfect and I want to stay at Lorelie's inn

@NameChange84
Oh my goodness that must have been terrifying.

Never saw anything like that.
My daughter got married in the Victorian style blue clapperboard house called Herons cay overlooking lake Dora.

She had her reception at the , name I forget but might have been secret garden tea rooms , closed when we last visited about 9 years ago. Very sadly
It was all stencilled and pretty ornaments, all Florida style. You’d get the purple hat brigade their on a regular basis.
Their beef olives were to die for and the rosemary baked chicken pie ..omg..delicious.
That was our starter, then the olives, and whatever desert we fancied off the menu..Parisian breast was sumptions.
They kindly allowed us to bring our own champagne and as there was only 9 of us and two driving , I think we left them two bottles.

Fabulous day.

Carmel is my California town that I mentioned above!

I thought it perhaps was

Yes I've visited Celebration, but found it a bit strained; the Disney manipulation isn't to my taste and I found the fact it's overseen by some huge corporation rather than local people shows

Is anyone familiar with Hingham in Massachusetts? That's another lovely little town and those who work in Boston get to enjoy a ferry ride across the bay. What a treat to begin every day of your working life ...

@Dowser I know Hingham and Cohasset but I prefer the North shore of Boston for quaint little towns.

[quote namesnamesnamesnames]@namechange84 Wow that's terrible, so people have no choice about how they present their home and garden? I couldn't live like that. [/quote]
I grew up in the Duchy of Westminster. We didn’t either. White paint. Black doors. Brass letterbox.
We revelled once with a red door. Got a very stern letter telling us to sort it out.

We would be plagyed with raccoons raiding the bins

Oh no, don't mention raccoons!!!!
I stayed on Long Island (home exchange) where they had buried waste bins which I was told to put out only on the morning the truck visited. Like a fool I thought I knew better and put them out overnight after having a chicken barbecue
The air was blue as I stomped about, picking up the mess from all over the road ...

Oh my goodness that must have been terrifying

It was, I still feel sick thinking about it. He’d been following me for a while and I thought I’d lost him. I didn’t know if he was going to sexually assault me, or if it was a race based attack and he had a gun. It’s really ruined Mt Dora for me and I can’t ever face going back there. The fact it happened in such a safe seeming quaint town made it all the more jarring. And I have to say the locals weren’t all that sympathetic, as I was clearly an outsider.

Yes I've visited Celebration, but found it a bit strained; the Disney manipulation isn't to my taste and I found the fact it's overseen by some huge corporation rather than local people shows

I agree with this sentiment and that’s why it’s not amongst my favourite Florida small towns...I see it as more of an attraction than an authentic experience. However, I suggested it to the OP as it’s much easier to visit there and get somewhat of a taste of the experience of “idyllic small town America” as so many people go to Orlando and being adjacent to WDW it’s much simpler to get to than say Charleston or New Bern in the Carolinas or Franklin, TN, Ft Collins, CO for example. Although Wilmington, NC is lovely at Christmas OP and is where Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill were filmed so do go there if you ever get the chance. Carriage Ride at night with some cocoa round the Victorian Mansions viewing the Holiday Lights...I promise you WILL feel like the star of your own Hallmark Movie. Quite a few hot single guys there too .

Based on this thread, I’d like to give Vermont a go. It’s one of the relatively few states I’ve not had the opportunity to visit yet. It looks and sounds gorgeous.

Wilmington, NC is lovely at Christmas

Isn't it just Though I'm not sure if the battleship with its resident enormous alligator is open to visitors in the winter?

And yes you were right to offer Celebration as an "example", but it still reminds me of Charles's ghastly Poundbury in Dorset. If anyone's old enough to remember The Prisoner, that's another place where you expect a ruddy great white ball to come bouncing down the street

Overall though it drives me insane that so many visit Florida and see practically nothing except the theme parks. Each to their own of course, but do they really imagine that's all the wonderful state has to offer?