Sunday, May 11, 2008
Though she once lambasted the ersatz holiday spirit of her Southern California childhood, expatriate Debra Ollivier thinks again after getting to know the ritual-heavy Christmas tradition in France.
Dec 22, 1997 | When I was a kid in L.A., Christmas was marked by tinsel over used car lots, fake snow on yuletide palms and beach-front Nativity scenes with J.C. Penney mannequins decorated as baby Jesus in polyester garb and wigs. In this ersatz wonderland we celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah (and later Easter and Passover) because we were born Jews but raised "citizens of the world." It didn't matter that the roots of Christmas were as deep as a manhole or that Rudolph dashed over Wilshire Boulevard, presumably on his way to the Broadway. The point was to have a good time, and we did.
Decades later, I lambasted L.A. for the way it conspired against the conventions of "real" Christmas. Then I moved to France.
Appropriately enough, one of the most "real" things about a French Christmas is food. In a country that does more with blood and brains than most Americans do with whole wheat and tomato, the French bring the whole farm to your foyer: With taxidermic flair butchers display large game birds, rabbits as soft and furry as your cat and whole pigs strangely festooned with herbs and ribbons, stretched out in mid-leap, their snouts the size of golf balls. (Just in case you don't get the message, one of them has an entire boar hanging in front of his shop, cloven hooves and all.) In the less fleshy realm of food consumption, little French flags and roving musette bands herald the arrival of the latest Beaujolais nouveau. Boy Scouts sell homemade tarte Tatin for five francs a slice. And chestnuts really ARE roasting on an open fire.
Those with family in the country leave Paris for little hamlets and snowy villages -- places you won't find in your guidebook -- where people eat those blood sausages and stuffed pheasant and drink enormous quantities of Borgogne. My first French Christmas was spent in one such village, a place so deep in the heart of France that people actually start to resemble advertisements for packaged tours to the Dordogne. Against this backdrop for Rudolph's slope and sleigh, far from the insipidly romanticized province, where Parisians flee the city only to flee back as quickly as they came, it's not Santa who's protean but Jesus Christ himself, the real McCoy. There's little room here for the mix-and-match, buffet-style religion that makes Americans seem like curious hybrids to the French. You're either a Catholic, a Jew or Something Else Entirely. In short, this is where the French put Christ back in the word Christmas, and it's so far from the Zeitgeist of the Parisian metropolis that at one point between the foie de veau and the poulet farci aux fines herbes (whose relatives were in the backyard furiously pecking away at bits of frozen corn), a jovial, ruddy-faced in-law named Pierrot leaned over to me and asked with earnest curiosity if Americans celebrated Christmas.
Pierrot's question not only reminded me of how far from home I really was, it also prompted the childhood memory of the expatriates from exotic lands who used to drift through our holiday crash pad, castaways from family feuds and distant lands who looked vaguely suspicious in the eyes of a judgmental, self-conscious preteen. Who WAS that Bengali in the Santa cap? What ABOUT that Ethiopian drinking egg nog in rubber thongs and shorts? Somehow these people provoked my own inchoate feelings that, like the Coneheads who crash landed in a Jersey suburb, we didn't entirely fit in, and watching them filled me with the remorseful thought that they were getting gypped. After all, if they wanted a real Christmas, they'd come to the wrong house.
Now as a castaway myself from what seems like a different planet, I have an odd appreciation for those days of yore when the hallmark of Christmas was that there was no hallmark at all. In France the holiday spirit is so insistent, so irreconcilably real with the icons of a white Christmas, that it inspires a sort of melancholic gloom. On the other hand, the beauty of L.A. is that if you're not into Christmas, there's always the beach. My husband put it differently. Burdened as a kid by years of traditional French Catholic Christmases, he remarked that Xmas in L.A. reminded him of seeing snowmen and sleigh bells in the African Congo. The incongruity of it all, however, made him happy.
So how do you pass on to your kid the cozy trappings of European ritual while fostering a taste for that "happy" permissive incongruity of L.A.? For my son, two undeniably obvious solutions await.
We might spend Christmas with our neighbors. I'll feel both sincerely heartwarmed and vaguely uncomfortable as a "citizen of the world." We'll go down one flight of badly carpeted orange stairs to the third floor. We'll eat a lavish, multi-course meal with complex cutlery. I may go to dinner in slippers. The door on the landing will be open. Not exactly happy permissive incongruity. But it's a start.
Chances are higher, however, that we'll go to L.A. We'll marvel at mega-malls and abundant parking spaces. We'll eat jumbo sushi plates for holiday dinner. We'll watch people simultaneously roller blade, drink Starbucks egg nog and talk on cellular phones while the French shiver in winter hoarfrost and eat their andouilette. Then, like refugees on a rampage, we'll go on blow-out, after-Christmas holiday sprees and consume vast amounts of cheap American staple goods. (Large economy packs of Haines underwear. Cotton crew socks. Stacks of ruled yellow pads.) We'll manage the unctuous and strained holiday cheer of extended family and extended credit cards. And if El Niqo doesn't send Santa reeling through an ozone hole or flailing down a canyon flood, we might even go to the beach. Then we'll return to Paris exhausted, sated and happy to be back. Yes Pierrot, they DO celebrate Christmas in America.
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