Parties & Openings

New Marlborough - May 21 The Old Inn hosts a dinner benefit for VIM.

Pawling - May 19 Raw Art at Gallery on the Green.

Sharon - May 19 The 12th annual Trade Secrets at Lion Rock Farm.

[See more Parties articles]

Holiday Cheer at Mills Mansion

Rural Intelligence Parties and Openings By Kathryn Matthews

It felt like 1910 again. On December 3rd, guests, dressed in festive attire, gathered at Mills Mansion in Staatsburgh, NY, for its annual holiday party, hosted by The Friends of Mills Mansion (FOMM). Decked out in its Edwardian holiday finest through December 31st, the mansion—the late 19th century country home of financier Ogden Mills and his wife Ruth Livingston Mills (left)—boasts four Christmas trees, in the front Main Hall, oval room, Mrs. Mills’ sitting room and the library, and an elaborately decorated Gilded Age dining table. In addition to viewing Mrs. Mills’ recently repainted and gilded boudoir, party guests descended to the basement to tour a restoration-in-progress—the servants’ quarters and the just-opened Ogden Mills exhibit room, formerly a bedroom for bachelor guests. This month, the mansion is open Wednesday - Sunday from 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.; last tour at 4 p.m. ($5; $4 seniors). And, for the next three Sundays (December 12, 19 and 26) from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., Mills Mansion offers kids, ages 6 - 12, a chance to play junior detective in a special Holiday Whodunit.

Playwright Clifford Hart; Bill Oris of JP Morgan Chase; Jeanne Murphy, General Counsel for Actimize Inc. in NYC; and Kyla Lange Hart, a principal of Toniq.com

Singer-songwriter Janice Grace (also the organist at Rhinebeck’s Dutch Reformed Church); Scott Brod of Morgan Stanley; FOMM board member Sharon Dixon Coughlan; and Gregory Campus

FOMM board member Mary Elizabeth Page and Jason Page, a managing partner at Park Page Associates; Isaac Ashworth and Eve Ashworth, of Ashworth Creative in Poughkeepsie; Hyde Park Planning Board Chairman and FOMM treasurer Michael Dupree and FOMM president Caroline M. Carey

Lynn Lobotsky and Susan Calfrancesco, co-owners of Wonderland Florists & Nursery in Rhinebeck flank Stephanie Harrison, a teacher at Mill Road Elementary School in Red Hook; Jennifer Hammoud, president of the Rhinebeck Science Foundation, IBM engineers Emily Kinsen and Alex Wei and Ali Hammoud, M.D., a cardiologist with Cardiology Consultants of the Hudson Valley

Poet Jane Garrick, Janice Grace, and Ted Rothstein , principal of TR Technologies; violinist Julie Berman, and Melodye Moore, recently retired as Mills Mansion site manager and founder of FOMM

Carol Gordon, COO of Rhinebeck Savings Bank, and filmmaker Sarah Johnston Levine; Voice actor Angela Henry and Bryan Henry