French Holiday Secrets: Trees, Kings and Metro Passes

This week I wanted to share a few French secrets we have discovered about the holiday season…

1.       Your Christmas tree doesn’t need to be watered! When we first talked about buying a tree we assumed that we would need to buy a stand and water it just like we had always seen our parents do growing up. However, all of the trees around here are nailed snuggly into a big chunk of wood and we didn't see tree stands for sale anywhere. Finally we decided to go French style and just use the wooden stand that it comes with. We were nervous that it would turn crispy in a matter of days… but it lasted a month!!

2.       Use a Christmas tree corral: Every couple streets have a sectioned off area for everyone to bring their old Christmas trees for disposal. You just bag up your tree and carry it over to the conveniently located Christmas tree graveyard, easy peasy...well, mostly easy... I finally took ours out this morning and while it was relatively painless, I did leave a trail of pine needles trying to get the tree out of the apartment building and the tree and I only BARELY both fit in the elevator. 

3.       Squeeze in an extra week of festivities! Instead of life jumping back to normal January 2^nd, decorations, celebrations and vacations continue on through at least January 7^th. This is because January 6^th is “la journée des rois” where people celebrate the day the wisemen came to visit the baby Jesus. As far as I can tell the only thing people do to celebrate is eat king cake, but it provides a nice excuse to keep decorations up a little longer, plus king cake is delicious! We have eaten a number of them at this point. They all come with a small toy/token item inside and whoever gets the piece with the little 'fève' is the king for the day. At church the Primary shared a king cake and Gideon got the lucky piece. All the other kids were super excited to tell us that Gideon, “is the KING!!”

In addition to leaving up lights and eating cake, the neighborhood celebrations keep going longer. For example, our small town has had a little free ice-skating rink up for the kids to enjoy during the Christmas season, but up until now, we were too busy to maximize on that opportunity. So, finally this week we took the boys to go ice skating for the first time. It was so fun! They even had little skates for Pierce so that he could shuffle around on the ice. The girls running the rink organized some of the older kids into a “spectacle” (a little dance routine on the ice) and had everyone play a freeze/skate game. Gideon was especially obsessed. In fact, he loved it so much that we decided to go back the next day too. The second day, while walking to the rink Gideon said, “mommy! I am just so excited to go ice skating that I just want to be there right now!!” We were super grateful we could squeeze just a little more magic out of the holiday season!

For our own King Day celebration, we decided to actually go inside the castle right in our backyard. It seems silly that it’s taken us so long to go in there, but we always think, “Oh we can always go there” and then never do… until this week! It was super cool… it was a chateaux during the Middle Ages and then turned into a prison. The prisoners housed here were transferred to the Bastille a few years before the famous fall of the Bastille where they were all released. We then went to the market at Nation where we did a walking lunch --- buying a bunch of different things to try from various vendors. The favorite was a cinnamon roll type bun that Benjin affectionately called, “classy monkey bread.” We ended the day by snuggling up to watch Lion King, which King Gideon thought was the BEST way to finish a day about Kings.

Other highlights from the week included having a few friends over for dinner. On Wednesday we had the missionaries over. One of them is from Tahiti and speaks very little English. So, it was fun to have a chance to be forced to use our French. Then on Sunday we had our new friend Marianne over. She is an English teacher and part of our ward. She has a remarkable history and it was great to have the chance to get to know her better and hear some of it.

Finally, on Thursday I took the boys to St. Denis. It was kind of our last hurrah before Gideon started back at school. We took the metro all the way up there (about an hour) and the boys did a fabulous job exploring the church (which is known as the birthplace of Gothic architecture) and wandering through the crypt (the church is also where all of the kings of France were buried… ie: Clovis, Henri, Francois, etc). We had a picnic at a little park because it was relatively warm for being January and Gideon went on a little zipline that was part of another leftover Christmas market. It was a great time until we started heading home….As we were walking through the turnstiles in the Metro Pierce started screaming because he wanted to scan his pass like a big boy. So, I handed him my pass after scanning it to stop the wailing. Gideon thought that was funny and handed his to Pierce as well. We then walked about 10 steps to a staircase that took us down to the train platform. Thankfully a kind gentleman offered to help me carry the stroller down the stairs. Just as we reached the bottom the train pulled up and we hopped on. My first thought was, "perfect timing!" My second thought was, "You have got to be kidding me!"... I looked down and realized Pierce was now only holding one pass just as the metro doors were closing. I frantically searched the stroller, pockets, etc as the train rolled on. At the next stop we bailed and raced to the other side of the tracks where we had to wait what felt like ages to get on the train going back to the previous stop. We finally made it back and searched frantically -- even asking the metro attendant, but to no avail. Sadly, my brand new, 90 euro, monthly metro pass was gone during the first couple days of the month! So, I guess my last Parisian secret is: NEVER hand your metro pass to your toddler! 

And with that we enter the toughest quarter of the year... good luck to us all!! :D

Lots of love, 

La famille Facer