The French Journal

Paris Christmas Pictures - Part 2: Faire du lèche-vitrine

Over at the Toronto Globe and Mail, there's a nostalgic article about Christmas window shopping which extols the beauty of Parisian window displays at this time of the year. It is accompanied by a slideshow of photos at the Au Printemps windows by Francis Peyrat.

P.S.  Window shopping in France is known as "faire du lèche-vitrine," or window-licking. I'll explain more in my next post.

Paris Christmas Pictures, Part 1

The Houston Chronicle has a slideshow of Paris at Christmas by François Durand of Getty Images. Enjoy!

Paris at Christmas

" We went to Paris last Christmas, and this year the holiday already feels anticlimactic." Thus begins this Monday's escape, the story of a two-week family vacation in Paris at Christmas, courtesy of the LA Times. I beg the indulgence of TFJ readers if I'm overdoing the holiday routine; it may be an occupational hazard resulting from being a Francophile blogger of Christian background.

And every approach is different. This article varies from the one of a month ago, which concentrated on well-to-do adults celebrating New Year's. Here, the kids are a factor, and there are nuggets which will give you that old Paris homesickness. Such as this follow-up to comparing Paris with Christmas at home:

"How can even the most elaborately decorated house compare with the blazing avenue of the Champs-Élysées, the Louvre carved bronze against the night, or the Eiffel Tower suddenly fizzing with champagne light, reflected in the windows on every nearby street?...My famous date-nut bread and gingerbread cookies can't compete with a hundred bûches de Noël (yule log cakes) in every shop window..."

There were, of course, many joys, family version. The city was less crowded than usual. The kids had playgrounds and carousels to explore. Toting an infant around gives new meaning to all of those images of the Baby Jesus. And when one of the kids insists on McDonald's fries, they turn out to be the best McDonald's fries ever.

Okay, CL, maybe not this year. Maybe not next. But 2009? Well, that's what Monday daydreams are for.

All about Noël

In my imagination I see French students all over the world given assignments to write about holiday traditions in France. So, to help all of those dutiful éleves, I'll direct them to a great resource on Christmas in France: the one compiled by FranceGuide, which is the official tourism site of France. In it you will find articles about how the holidays are celebrated in Burgundy, the Franche-Comté, Normandy, Alsace, and elsewhere. Another page is devoted to the best-known Christmas markets, such as Montélimar, Montbéliard, Chartres, and seven others.

There's a bit more.  The wife of the French ambassador to Trinidad talks to a local newspaper (Trinidad & Tobago's Newsday) about how she and her family recognized the holiday in Provence. It includes this local precept: "Christmas is for family, New Year is for friends.”

For the rest of us, the non-éleves, we get to enjoy the articles without having to regurgitate any of them.

A Provençal Christmas eve (featuring 13 "desserts")

Having read Anthony Peregrine's maligning of the traditional thirteen Christmas desserts of Provence last week -- he called them "mueslix" --  I've decided to research the matter and elaborate.

The desserts are part of a Christmas eve, pre-Midnight Mass gros souper at a table set with three tableclothes and three candlesticks. The starting courses of the meal include a bagna cauda (a kind of fondue), cardoons (a kind of artichoke), and a fish soup.

The first four desserts are the mendiants, representing orders of monks and the colors of their habits: hazelnuts (Augustinians), almonds (Carmelites), raisins (Dominicans), and dried figs (Franciscans). As someone who was taught by Franciscans, I have no comment on that pairing.

Next comes walnuts and another dried fruit, followed by either a quince paste or candied fruit. Then there's three fresh fruits, usually apples, pears, and one of grapes, tangerines, melon, or oranges. This brings us up to ten. (So far, this is sounding like a deconstructed fruit cake.)

Two nougats, soft white and hard black, make it twelve. The final dessert is a cake, pompe de Noël à l'huile d'olive, made with yeast, egg, sugar, and citron flavors, pulled apart and not sliced. This may be served with a vin cuit -- a sweet wine -- or a Carthagène, a combo of spirits and grape must.

All in all, they sound fairly simple to gather, except for the cake, and here's a recipe for that.

Source: Culinaria France

Blog robbing: "Culture" backlash, Royal excuses, Saint Nick's Day, and the 14th Arrondissement

For this post, I'm going to steal from other blogs, but it's morally okay because of attributions.

• The culture wars continue. Last week's Time article about the death of French culture has inspired lots of chatter, including a screed in The Guardian by Agnès Poirier who uses it a pretext to knock Americans. One of the many commenters responded cleverly. (The beginning, in italics, is a quote from Poirier, and the rest is the response.)

"Forget winning a ticket to the Superbowl, sleeping with Paris Hilton or getting an Oscar: for some Americans, there is nothing more titillating than the idea of the end of France. It pops up regularly on the cover of serious and prestigious publications."

"Yes. Wherever one goes in the Midi of the United States, one find Americans sitting in their ramasseurs and their intimate cafes earnestly discussing the decline of French civilization while sipping from mason jars of claire de lune. French culture and its decline is an obsession over here."

HT This French Life.

P.S. More on the French reaction from The Telegraph (U.K.), via Frogsmoke.

P.S. And mon amie Polly Vous Francais also defends the honor of France in her post of 7 decembre.

• A Royal martyr. Defeated French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has published a new book, and Charles Bremner of The Times (London) has the skinny: "True to form, she writes as if she did not really lose, at least not morally...Her non-victory, as she depicts it, was the fault of everyone else, especially the party elders who she says set out to sabotage her...She was also dragged down by François Hollande, her party leader and life-long partner who was having an affair with a journalist." Royal also claims that Hollande asked recently for a reconciliation, which she refused.
• Christmas comes early to Alsace. Le 6 decembre, the feast of Saint Nicolas, is celebrated around Alsace, Lorraine, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and Brittany with visits from Père Noël, and mon amie La Belette Rouge offers the deep background.
• Thievery galore in service of tears. Blue Vicar published text from the final scene of Paris, Je T'aime. Spoken by an American visitor to the city, the words apotheosize the feelings that new Francophiles feel when they go to France for the first time and are overcome. I'm going to scoop Blue V., for a video of the entire segment is on YouTube; enjoy it while you may; who knows when the copyright police will swoop down. You might need to turn up the sound. I cry every time I watch it.

Stocking the larder for Christmas with oysters, foie gras, etc.

Travel articles are few at the moment and I almost started off the week with a tour of cemeteries, rather grim for a Monday. Instead, I'll take the seasonal hint from the snow falling outside my window and invite you to join me as I follow Anthony Peregrine of The Times (London) as he travels around France to find the finest provisions for Christmas meals. Here's the line-up:

• Oysters. Bypassing some of the more well-known spots in the northwest, Peregrine goes to a little village in the Languedoc called Bouzigues, where an oyster purveyor advises you to chew on the molluscs.
• Foie gras. Where else but the southwest? If you can't get there, order the delicacy on-line.
• Poultry. Bresse, of course, for chicken, and Calais for turkey.
• Cheese. According to Peregrine, Roquefort is the tradition here.
• Dessert. La bûche -- a cake in the shape of a log -- is mandatory, but the best are home made. (Peregrine disses the traditional 13 desserts of Provence: "They’re less festive than muesli.")

Joyeux Noël! Bon appétit!

Fête des Lumières - 2007

It's the time of year for me to get orgasmic about the Fête des Lumières in Lyon. This year, "great installations" will include "The Orchards of Yesteryear," where green lighting will recreate the feel in a Lyon park of a use from long ago, "Fishing for Stars," in Louis Pradel Square, where "fishermen on the Milky Way...cast their nets to catch cosmic dust and the stars shining on the facades of the square," and "Anagram Image," in which "squares slowly appear on the facade of a theatre until they fill up with projections and create a checkerboard of graphic motifs." The glory begins on December 8. Lots more to see as well!

A grinch goes to Strasbourg

The bad news is that Anthony Peregrine of The Times (London) thinks that the Strasbourg Christmas Market, which attracts 1.6-million visitors annually and is the biggest in France, is mostly about worthless trinkets and undrinkable mulled wine. The good news is that Peregrine loves Strasbourg and believes that it has plenty of seasonal charm. Taking a lead from a competing newspaper, he offers ten reasons for visiting the city, each of which he gives a colorful header like "adulteresses" but which I'll paraphrase.

• Cozy architecture, meant for winter cocooning
• Good, Alsatian cuisine
• A university ambiance
• The cathedral
• The old town
• The bateau mouche tour
• The Alsace museum
• The German heritage
• The Saxe mausoleum (a "delirious" monument in a Protestant church)
• The Christmas markets (Counter to his opening complaints, he grudgingly admits the lights, concerts, and general atmosphere are genial.)

I'm going to try and find as many articles as I can on holiday traditions in different regions of France. In the meantime, if that's your interest, be sure to check out this post from last year in French Virtual Cafe.