Joyeux Noël

Joyeux Noël!  I realize it's a little belated, but it has been a busy couple of weeks in the U.S. of A. spending the holidays with family over here.  It has been wonderful, and as I write this post I am sitting in an airport wishing for a blizzard carrying 5 feet of snow that would shut down all air traffic for at least a week and keep us here.  (I'm not worried about being stuck at the airport... I know Mom and Dad would come rescue us!)  But alas, I fear said blizzard is not coming, especially given the rain outside.

Before heading over the ocean to spend Christmas with my side of the family, we did manage to catch a few "must-see" things in Paris around the holidays.  The most fun, I think, were the window displays at Printemps and Galeries Lafayette.  Last year the displays were pretty cool, and this year was just as fun.  Whereas last year I think that Printemps was my favorite, this year the Galeries LaFayette were pretty great.  I'll let you decide....

The Christmas displays at Galeries Lafayette were sponsored and designed by Swatch.  I have to say the clock gear windows were really cool.  You could see all the moving pieces and the hidden clock parts that made everything move.  It was a lot of fun.  Each window was a different scene of a related theme.

I would like to attend a Christmas dinner like this one.  It looked like all the little animals who were invited were having a good time.

This year checking out the Christmas displays was especially fun because we had a visitor with us!  Kim and Paul indulged me and smiled for the camera. 

The windows at Printemps were also cool.  They were sponsored by Prada.  To be honest, though, I really liked the Galeries Lafayette windows better.  A few of these ones had moving parts, but the others were mostly just big mannequins modeling the clothes.

Google made this one sparkle for me.  

These skiing Teddy Bears were pretty cute.

So that's one traditional French thing we did for the holidays.  We also did some serious shopping at the Christmas markets.  We visited the marché on the Champs-Elysées, at La Défense, and in front of Sacré-Cœur.  Although its neighborhood is the least charming, the market at La Défense was definitely the best.  We found a few Christmas presents there and in general were pretty pleased.  The one on the Champs-Elysées was by far the most touristy.  We had a hard time finding things there that were French at all.  We did, however, find the traditional Christmas Octopus!  I was unaware of that being a tradition, and I'm pretty sure that it is not.  But it made for a fun picture.

 So that is a little snippet of some French holiday traditions we enjoyed before our travels.  This year will be my first New Years in France, so I'm looking forward to that.  I'll let you know if anything is very different.

Happy Holidays!

Happy Frenchgiving!

Happy Belated Thanksgiving!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and that you're still enjoying the leftovers you probably have from your bountiful feast!

This may not come as a surprise to you, but none of the pilgrims landed in France.  Or maybe they did, but they were not met by friendly Native Americans who decided to share their harvest.  Either way, sadly there is no official Thanksgiving holiday here.  We all have to go to work on the last Thursday of November with little or no ceremony, unless you happen to be around other Americans.

Now, mostly for entertainment and informational purposes, I will share a couple of tidbits about preparing a Thanksgiving dinner in France.

• Whole turkeys don't exist in France in November.  Well, they do, but they are still alive.  Here's the thing -- the French roast turkeys for Christmas.  That is all.  If you want to roast a whole turkey at any other time of the year, you need to order it at the butcher's about five days in advance.  Last year we learned this the hard way.  We went to four boucheries and called a few more before we found a place that had turkeys.  When we got there we got to choose between plucked and unplucked.  Yikes.  
• This won't come as much of a surprise, but some American products just don't exist in France.  Sad as it is, the lack of Stove Top Stuffing is somewhat predictable.  However, you might not guess that the canned pumpkin you need to make pumpkin pie isn't a French product and can't be found in a typical supermarket.   
• Okay, it's not that these products don't exist in France.  It's the age of globalization, so of course they exist in France.  However, their prices are inflated to gasp-inducing levels.  Also, right around Thanksgiving all of the "American" stores are swamped.  (At least something feels like home, I guess).
• Apple tartes in France aren't made with cinnamon, so if you aren't making your own, it's not going to taste like it should for Thanksgiving.
• Just about everything here is smaller.  I have a beautiful roaster pan that we received for our wedding.  It does not fit in our oven.  The turkey went in something else.  

Those are just some fun, "Oh France" moments.  If you want to read about some others, this article is pretty entertaining.

In addition to these logistical hurdles, it's a bit strange to be in a foreign country on what is a major holiday to you, but is just another day to everyone else.  I had to keep reminding myself it was a special day, and I tried to say Happy Thanksgiving to everyone I saw who would be interested.  It was a little sad when I thought of how my family was gathering together and my friends were all back in my hometown getting together.  It's tough to realize that life goes on without you sometimes.  Ah well.

But life goes on here too, and we had an excellent holiday in Paris.  On the evening of Thanksgiving, a couple of my coworkers (an American-English marriage) invited everyone from our office over for a potluck Thanksgiving dinner.  There were only about five Americans present, but it was just lovely.  Everyone brought some sort of homemade dish that's special where they come from (or something they were confident cooking) and there was plenty of wine and beer to go around.

While the potluck dinner was delicious, this wasn't what made it special for me.  Last year, after having only been in France for about two months, Thanksgiving was tough.  We cheated a bit and went to Ireland to celebrate a lovely weekend with some close friends.  But we also tried to celebrate in France, trying to embrace our new home and our life here.  What really happened was we spent Thanksgiving with a group of people who weren't quite a group of friends.  But this year, after a season of working with this special mix of people, it felt really great to have friends with whom we could celebrate the holiday.  It's wonderful to have one of those "ah ha!" moments when you realize that you're part of something, that you have a community.  It's especially great when it makes a holiday feel the way it's supposed to feel.  It was clear to me on Thursday night that we have a lot to be thankful for.

After our great big Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, Paul and I hosted a smaller dinner with a few of our friends on Saturday.  (Since a lot of Americans seem to do their big turkeys on this Saturday, I decided to refer to it as Frenchsgiving).  This also was pretty great.  We weren't meeting people at this dinner like we were the year before.  We were with our friends.  And for this occasion, it wasn't just me, Paul, and people he's known forever.  It was a mix of old friends and new, and it was a dinner that would make my parents proud.  The food was delicious and we set the table for a holiday -- we used our china and crystal for the second time ever.  With the food, the friends, and the little bit of ceremony and tradition, it felt like a real Thanksgiving.

When I think about it, I have a lot to be thankful for this year.  When we arrived, Paul had a lot of good friends and family who were very kind to me.  Today I feel like they're also my friends and family, and they're not just Paul's friends being nice to me.  I'm also really happy to have met some really wonderful new friends of my own in Paris.  Then when I think about the amazing friends and family we have in the US, I realize how incredibly blessed we are.

So, I hope you all enjoyed your holiday as much as I did.  I can't wait to celebrate the next one, Christmas, with my friends and family back (in my other) home.