2025 in Southern Gables

___

Well, that was quite a year! Now that 2026 has its foot in the door, let’s look back at 2025 with grateful thoughts, and take a tour back through the past year. Here on the Southern Gables Neighborhood website we have featured weekly articles about events and activities of the changing seasons, and enjoyed inspirational and funny stories by our neighborhood writers: a record of the year as we lived it. We’d say 2025 was a pretty good year for Southern Gables. Wouldn’t you?

---

We started 2025 with a reminder about the importance of community (you might anticipate a recurring theme here) from the perspective of supporting local businesses. Just Between Us, we thought it was a pretty important idea. The relationship between merchants and customers has a deeper social significance when it’s between friends and neighbors. Keeping it local helps everyone, and as we wrote in February, Our Southern Gables Selected Business Supporter program brings the idea up close. and we’re working to make it even better in the coming year.

Seasonal themes, activities, and events included an informative article by Joe Woelkers on How Trees Prepare for the “Big Chill.” Then there was Getting Through the Winter, Joe again with Spring into Motivation, and then Lakewood’s annual harbinger of spring, the Lakewood Tree Sale. (Don’t miss it this year, March 2. Info.) Our Spring Newsletter (here if you missed it) got us going toward summer’s activities. We encouraged some Neighborly Commerce with a coordinated garage sale weekend. Our neighbor Pam Engel-Livick pointed us to some City of Lakewood recreational and educational activities in May and July, and we had lots of Neighbors Getting Together at Summer Block Parties in Southern Gables sponsored by the Neighborhood Association. Approaching the Fourth of July we provided a thoughtful essay on Flags and Fireworks. Our big event, the annual Neighborhood Night Out, was lots of fun. You can mark the date for 2026 so you don’t miss it — Friday, August 21.

In September we celebrated the award of the Lakewood Mayor’s Inspiration Award to Doug and Judy Whitten. “As charter members and founders of the Southern Gables Neighborhood Association, Doug and Judy Whitten have worked tirelessly together as a team in dedication to creating a positive, welcoming neighborhood.” With fall coming we delivered the fall newsletter (here) and published stories about Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and our leaf-raking project for elderly and disabled residents: The Falling Leaves.

A safety reminder came from our guest writer Liza Patty, “We feel pretty safe here in Southern Gables but we occasionally see reports of vehicle break-ins, or more often things taken from unlocked cars here and in nearby neighborhoods…” In other words, Be Careful out There!

Neighborhood literary interests were reflected in book reviews: January’s was Prince – Beauty for Ashes, written by our friend Prince Kayigire, who was a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide and now owns one of our favorite neighborhood places, the Cultivar Café. We promoted his book release (An Evening with Prince) in March, and in May we published his article A Voice Elevated. In that piece, Prince explains the connection between his harrowing story of persecution and opening a place for community gathering. He says he wanted his work “to serve a purpose beyond myself—to be a way of contributing to the community in a meaningful way.” He also gave a link in that article where you can read his book for free. Other book reviews for the Southern Gables Book Club, were Demon Copperhead, The Wedding People, All the Quiet Places, A Breeze in Bulgaria, Mailman, and the Southern Gables Book Club Selection for January, The Nickel Boys. There was also a book report of sorts about The Giving Tree, related to our support for student programs at Green Gables Elementary.

Volunteering is something that builds community, helps others, and gives individual satisfaction to the volunteer. We promoted a volunteer painting project with Letting Good Flow, and pitched in to help when Joy’s Kitchen was Facing a Challenge for Survival (They survived it so far, are now in a new location, and the need for volunteers is constant… joyskitchen.org). Another path to serving the community is Lakewood’s Community Emergency Response Team, offering free training in first aid, CPR, and other facets of disaster response.

Meet Your Neighbor is one of our favorite topic categories. This past year we met Charles and Shannon Holiday, Goldie Barrett, Carol Hamer, and Karol Paul. Our neighbor Karol, you might recall, is a certified Reflexologist and a Southern Gables Selected Business Supporter. In learning about Karol’s unique profession, we got some insight into reflexology. In a similar way we turned the “spotlight” on two of our other Business Supporters and their close connections to Southern Gables: Audrey Charness of Crossroads at Lakewood and Jordan Tartaglioni at our local Les Schwab Tire Center.

Stories, stories… Sometimes we just shared stories because they were interesting or insightful, and written by some of our neighbors who like to write. Harry Puncec provided an article titled Essayons, about serving in the Army during the Berlin Wall crisis. Ken Fischer told us about solving a mystery in his early police career, The Case of the Elusive Cat Burglar. Ken has shared stories over the years, of characters he has met as a student, teacher, police officer, woodsman, and as a wise and generous observer of humanity. His story The Only Spy I Ever Met covered two of those categories. Back in March, I was away for a week and took the liberty of sharing a personal loss, telling you about My Cousin Beth.

Wrapping up the old year on a festive note, our annual holiday mailbox decoration contest drew six entrants, all winners in bringing touches of holiday cheer to the neighborhood. 

Finally, we took you on a walk around the neighborhood to look at the lights. It was a drive actually, with lots of stops. (We have 9 miles of streets in Southern Gables!) I could hardly do justice to all the clever and inspired nighttime holiday displays, but through the camera lens it looked like this: Lighting up Southern Gables.

With those memories soon fading into the past, let’s decide to make the best of the new year. Care and consideration, helping one another, and kindness. Good neighbors. That’s what we have in Southern Gables, and we treasure it. 

---

---

Subscribe to get an email notice when our weekly articles are published.