Silver City, Nevada- I lived in Silver City for decades before finally understanding what was so different, and so special, about the community’s holiday gatherings – the Christmas dinners with visits from Santa, Easter luncheons with egg hunts in the park, Thanksgiving dinners with enormous turkeys cooked to perfection.
Silver City’s holiday gatherings reflect a concept known as “Dunbar's number,“ or the “cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.” British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed this idea in the 1990s. His research indicated that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 stable relationships. In layman’s terms, he described it as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."
So the unique feature of Silver City’s holiday gatherings is that in a town of less than 200, almost everyone knows one another, or knows “how each person relates to every other person.” The shared holiday meals are less like town events and more like reunions of extended family, and the School House (community center) has a welcoming atmosphere like that found in the home of kind grandparents. There’s an area with old fashioned toys where the kids can play while the adults linger over coffee and pie, and everyone always makes a fuss over new babies.
The other unusual aspect of the town’s holiday events that’s probably partly a function of the population size is that there is no performance of “charity.” I’ve never witnessed or heard of any gathering in which citizens of means made a point of serving a meal to their “less fortunate neighbors.” In Silver City, events are for the purpose of connecting, not dividing along class lines. Invitations often read, “bring a side dish if possible, and if not, please come anyway!”
Several years ago during a town meeting, locals developed a short description of the community that also reflects the stable social relationships found in a small population. They agreed that, “Silver City is a quiet, safe place to live and raise a family, and a town accustomed to standing up for itself. It is a community built on the values of knowing and caring for neighbors and for pitching in when need arises. We care for our kids, for our elders and for all others who can use a hand. Neighbor to neighbor, we stand by our community. Always.”
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