Saturday, December 27, 2008

Bonnes Fetes!

December in Paris is the time of holidays and short days --and as the sun never gets very high in the sky, there is dramatic lighting and long
shadows... even at noon!


We spent our Noel with our family --Andrew and Jenn and Timothy and our French family, Jacqueline and Philippe from Lyon. And it was joyeux!
And we did not have any of the pre-Christmas snow, ice, rain that battered the East Coast the week before! (I'll pass on these white Christmas dreams...)
Christmas morning, we went to Notre Dame for the Gregorian Mass which was said by the Archbishop and Cardinal Vingt-Trois (it is really his name). We got there early enough to hear the end of the 8:30 am mass and the choir perform at 9:30, and actually had good seats for the 10am high mass. It was in Latin and French and was the same mass I heard as a child --I was amazed that I recalled the songs and even some of the Latin. We got to go out through the main doors of Notre Dame which are always closed, so even that was a treat (as was the line for the international mass at 11:30, which was heading for Saint Chapelle if you know Paris).



As we had planned to have a Christmas dinner chez nous, we stopped for a cafe and then walked over to the Marias, which is the traditionally Jewish area for a falafel lunch! (As my sadly departed friend Mel always said when arriving for Christmas Eve, we are celebrating the birth of a nice Jewish boy!) It was lively in the Marias with tourists, families enjoying the nice weather and enterprising young people (note the menorah on top of the van).


Paris is busy Christmas week --there were lots of tourists. It was a bit surprising to me as we are always at family gatherings at Christmas (although, gives one food for thought...) There are several Christmas markets (although the place to go is Strasbourg and the other towns in Alsace for the spectacular German style markets).


Christmas creches are not in every church like they are in Italy. We were lucky as Saint Sulpice (yes, the Da Vinci Code church!) had a creche from Caltagirone, Sicily, which is well known for their decorative ceramics.




The most wonderful part of Christmas is that we were all together!

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