Livre d'Or

I love the concept of machetonim: I have long regretted that there isn't a good word for the relationships of my parents with Tony's. And of course, it is complicated by both our sets of parents being divorced, and three of the four of them remarrying, and relations mostly being amicable between all combinations thereof.

[On our honeymoon, we met and had a nice chat with a pair of older women whose children had been married (for several decades?), and who had become firm friends to the point of holidaying together regularly in their retirement.]

With the exception of Jonny, my family and Tony's are geographically far away, but we do stay in touch: siblings and parents and aunts and uncles and a few of the more distant cousins too. Most of our travel and most of our hosting of visitors is family contact with one branch or another.

On the other hand, the reason that we have to travel to see any of the family but J is because our roots are firmly set in Cambridge now, and part of that is a chosen community of friends that is also rooted here. My sister-in-law L and her husband seem to be part of a similarly rooted community in Sheffield; I'm very fond of them and their friends, but we would not want to give up our community here to be near them in Sheffield, and they would not want to leave Sheffield for us in Cambridge. Are our close friends "chosen extended family" then?