Christmas in Historic Urbanna, tomorrow, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Sunday, noon to 4:30 p.m. Tour Lansdowne, where costumed docents will explain Christmas as it may have been celebrated in this Flemish bond-brickwork home built in the 1700s. Also open will be Walesa Point, a designer showcase home overlooking Robinson’s Creek. Historic Middlesex Courthouse and Women’s Club will be open Saturday only, where ladies will share the recipe for their crab bisque that is so popular during the oyster festival.

When Ray Rucker and his wife, Meriam, bought a home in a middle-class Mechanicsville neighborhood in 1990, they were told the brick rancher was haunted. A ceiling light activated by a pull chain would mysteriously come on in one room, the previous owners said. Rucker was skeptical.

The thought hit as soon as the bus pulled up: “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.“ Actually, what I really had was a notebook, a pen and a digital recorder. Oh yeah, and a seat on Esotouric’s Raymond Chandler Bus Tour, having decided to learn whether L.A. really is, as Chandler’s hard-bitten detective Philip Marlowe once said, “just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style.“

Attendance at this spring’s Historic Garden Week in Virginia events exceeded expectations, with ticket sales surpassing $726,000. The statewide garden-club tours held each April have raised almost $15 million during the past 76 years. Proceeds benefit the restoration of historic public gardens throughout Virginia. At the 89th annual meeting of The Garden Club of Virginia last week, the Massie Medal for Distinguished Achievement - the club’s oldest and most prestigious award - was presented to Margaret Page Bemiss, author of “Historic Virginia Gardens: Preservation Work of The Garden Club of Virginia, 1975-2007.“ Bemiss is a member of the James River Garden Club.