It's only six days to Christmas now, and I still have gift shopping to do. Partially, this is due to my devotion to procrastination. But in my defense, it's been hard to remember that it's the holiday season here.
For the first time, there are no final exams to herald the impending winter break. Work comes and goes every day, indifferent to the smell of pine and the tinkling of faraway bells. Outside, there are no ostentatious River Oaks lighting displays to boast that Santa is coming and he's stopping in this neighborhood first. The French, more or less indifferent to Christmas because they are largely secular -- but also because they are French and indifference is kind of their thing -- don't stroll around babbling "Happy birthday Jesus" to strangers as if to prove that by having holiday cheer they are living a Good Christian Life. We "bonjour" and "au revoir" each other as in every other season, guarding our enthusiasm away for some later time.
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| Decorations on an average street. |
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| The Champs Elysées (Times Square of Paris) gets into the act though. |
Nonetheless, there are reminders here and there that we should be donning our gayest apparel and getting excited for Christmas. For starters, it is a well-accepted fact that holiday cheer commences approximately five minutes after the end of Thanksgiving. Our Thanksgiving was delayed this year, so our Christmas tree was correspondingly pushed back a week.
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| YUM. Why do we only eat pumpkin pie one day out of the year? |
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| So thankful. |
Once all of the turkey chicken (yeah, we took the easy way out) leftovers were fed to the cat, we set out to find our Christmas tree.
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| Mike: in charge of carrying the tree |
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| Catherine: in charge of decorating the tree |
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| Minidou: in charge of being lazy and generally unhelpful |
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| A cockatiel in a fir tree |
Holiday time also means family time, so the Bratics' visit to Paris marked a change in the season. They came to visit for five days, which were filled with food, shopping, and wandering the pavements of Paris.
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| On the Petite Ceinture, the Paris inspiration for New York's high line park. |
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| Banana nutella crepe!! |
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| Julia's not too excited about having to share. |
Being away from friends and family for ten months is incredibly difficult. Even more so during the holidays. Beneath the friendly words of coworkers asking each other, "are you going home for Christmas?" is the unmistakable subtext that you are supposed to be at HOME for the holidays, and home is NOT HERE. The query refers invariably to some faraway "home," whether you immigrated last week or twenty years ago. A reminder that there is a place where you inherently belong, if only you could get back to it. I suppose I could have started this post with a psycho-analytic discussion of my repression of holiday cheer in response to separation anxiety, but it's oh-so-much easier to blame French indifference and insufficient holiday lighting.
Working at UNESCO has given me a greater appreciation for not belonging to a group, and for embracing a culture of my very own, traceable back to my faraway home. Last month, I enthusiastically took up the task of making Polish
pierogies at holiday time, a tradition that I shared with my grandmother when I was a young girl, and have continued to share with my father into my adult years. This year was the first time I'd ever made pierogies all on my own.
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| I think I added too much water to the dough... |
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| I'm slowly getting the hang of these, but they're nothing compared to the little dumplings my grandmother could turn out. |
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| From Charles de Gaulle airport: even reindeer have unique holiday traditions reflecting their origins and culture. |
If there's one thing shared in all cultures across the world, though, it's that the holidays are a time to relax and enjoy yourself. Take a week off of work (or two), travel, eat, drink, visit loved ones, and be merry. My office is closed December 21 through January 1st, and I have a strict policy against having to work on my birthday, January 2nd, so we're taking a nice long vacation back home. Yes, real HOME. Where all your friends and family are, where people pronounce your name right, and where the food is somehow always better. Joy to the world, at least in my little corner of it.
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| What the holidays are really about: chilling at home. |
