In Search of the Perfect Christmas

Ever since I was little I’ve been in search of the perfect fairytale Christmas.

Maybe it’s just a product of having grown up in LA. Southern California is kind of seasonally challenged when it comes to the whole Christmas thing. There’s no snow, no frost on the window panes. There are no chestnut trees, and the only open fires are produced by either sterile gas burners or toxic Duraflame logs, neither of which are fit for roasting anything. So out of a kind of yuletide Napoleon complex, we overcompensate. You will never find so many people in Santa suits, holly wreaths, blinking lights or plastic reindeer than in LA. From late October to New Years Eve LA becomes one enormous celebration of climatically-confused winter-wonderland kitsch.

So ever since I left I have continued to act out this symbolic, neurotic quest for the perfect Christmas. Christmas in London ticked most of the boxes. Working on Fleet Street and living in a Victorian terrace house gave the season an undeniably Dickensian flavor, and the thought of mince pies and dark ales and the lights strung up over Regent Street still takes close to center stage in my imaginary idyllic holiday season. Even despite London’s particular winter horrors - the drunken office Christmas parties, the London Underground with its winter smell of chilled petroleum-based sludge, the disturbing English tradition of the Christmas pantomime – despite those downsides, we had good times in London over the holidays.

So now it’s our fourth year of Christmastime in the Quercy, and the fairytale jury is still out. I don’t quite know what I imagined – horse drawn sleighs maybe? Carolers wandering door to door, crossing the good mile or two between farms to sing a song and be rewarded with hot chocolate? At least a bit of snow, surely. The reality here, on the other hand, is resolutely more mundane.

The French don’t traditionally make much of Christmas. New Year’s Eve is their big excuse for winter celebration, and much of the Christmas festivity one sees nowadays is imported from the German or English traditions. That makes for an easy transition. The leap from Father Christmas to Père Noël wasn’t any harder than that from Santa Claus to Father Christmas. The mulled wine and Christmas lights remain a constant, and if mince pies have fallen off the radar screen, they’ve been replaced by crepes, walnut cakes and aligot, a specialty of the nearby Auvergne which seems to be a potato-and-white-cheese-based form of wallpaper paste. The French may lack the peculiar enthusiasm that the English bring to Christmas, they make up for it with a slow, quiet, family-focused holiday that has its own charms.

In fact, the quiet here can be a little overabundant. During summer, when our holiday cottages are full and our time and attention are in constant demand, we yearn for some solitude, but as winter sets in it sometimes brings a little cabin fever with it. Our old friends and extended family are all abroad, and most of our new friends here, whether French or foreign, have fled to spend the holidays with family elsewhere. Amid the hush of the winter countryside, house after house silent, shutters closed and chimneys cold, it’s hard not to wonder whether perhaps they all know something we don’t. And with the climate just mild enough to preclude the consolation of snow in most years, it’s no surprise that Claire and David rush off to family on the Mediterranean coast, or that Miranda takes the kids back to England during the school holidays. They know better than to hang around for cold rain and deep silence.

This year the village of Duravel hosted its second annual Christmas festival, and we were determined to take advantage of whatever holiday cheer we could lay our hands on. A Christmas of Legend, it was called. I suppose the idea was to bring to life various fairy tales, and to the extent that that was the goal, they did it well. And yet, as we bought our ticket and entered the enclosed public park where the event was being staged, I couldn’t help wondering what on earth all this had to do with Christmas.

For a start, there were the witches. I’m not just talking about one or two to evoke the story of Hansel and Gretel, which at least has a Christmas connection, however tenuous, via the gingerbread house. No, there were dozens of them. Five or six at least were clustered at the entrance, leering at the children as they entered and taunting them with threats to boil them in a cauldron. Another group had set up camp around the cauldron itself, just up the path, waiting for their hapless victims with a punitive glee which reminded me ever so slightly of Sebastian’s old kindergarten teacher. It was as if the French witches’ union had chosen Duravel for their annual convention. Their noses and green skin were most impressive, but there was a certain lack of, well, of ho ho ho about them.

The other fairy tales worked a bit better. There was a short Snow Queen play which, although inaudible, at least looked enchanting. The kids seemed to enjoy the maze of white pebbles which lead to hidden treasure (in practical gift certificate form), and only perhaps one in three burst into tears when adults in wolf costumes jumped out from behind trees to startle them. There were lambs, and a baby donkey, and in one corner an opportunity to have a photo taken with a scruffy-looking Père Noël. For braving the wolves, Sebastian was given a small Furby – its unreplaceable battery already dead - with McDonalds printed on the label. He was as happy as a clam.

This gentle, well-intentioned chaos was as far from a star-studded neon-lit Los Angeles Christmas as it could get. With the possible exception of those witches’ noses – detailed enough to have come straight off the set of the Wizard of Oz – everything about the evening was defiantly imperfect. The lighting was blinding in some places, nonexistent in others, and taken together would have met the test for gross negligence in any American court of law. The theatrics were resolutely amateur and the hygiene standards at the grilled sausage stand troubling. But for all that, it was wonderful. Scores of people had volunteered their time to make the evening a success, and for the hundreds of people who came, all the effort and good intentions seemed to be what mattered most. What it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in its generosity and simplicity. It was local. It was ours. It was a chance to get out and see other people. That’s all that mattered.

So I guess that’s where things stand with my fairy tale Christmas. No place is perfect, nothing can quite live up to the ideals we form in our heads while growing up. But a little imperfection focuses your attention on what matters. When the big day came, we gave Sebastian a new racetrack and I dutifully spend hours putting it together. The cars jump off the track all too easily, as they did with mine when I was little. There were tears. They dried again. It was as flawed and wonderful and happy a Christmas as anyone could want.

And this morning we had snow. Plenty of it.

Merry Christmas.

The Not-so-Fine Art of Woodcutting

Winter is in full swing, and a tenacious fog has wrapped itself around the Quercy. Colored lights have been strung in all the surrounding villages, and a large Christmas tree festooned with odd bits of multi-colored tinsel has taken up residence in front of the village hall. And from every chimney, down every country road, a cheerful plume of smoke rises to merge with the low leaden sky.

It’s woodcutting season, and I’m in my element.

Honestly, there’s nothing like starting up a chainsaw to boost a man’s sense of machismo. The weight of the machine, the little jolt of torque as the chain starts to spin, the seemingly gratuitous but necessary gunning of the motor to disengage the choke – it’s all calculated to bring on a testosterone high like nothing else. For me, it’s a high that lasts right until I start cutting.

I love cutting wood, but somehow, even in my fourth winter here, I’m not very good at it. Oh, I’ve improved, no question. I’ve got a better sense of how often to pause, pull out my file and sharpen the chain’s teeth. I know just what length to cut so that it’ll fit in the wood-burner, and which logs are too knotted to bother trying to split once I’ve cut them to size. I’ve got my rhythm, and I’ve still got all my fingers, so I can’t complain.

And yet it’s always humbling. Some days the logs seem to fight back. I’ll nestle one into the V of the sawhorse, and just as I reach down to pick up the chainsaw the log will inexplicably shift its weight and hit the ground with a mocking thud. So I reposition it for better balance, but now not enough of it is protruding for me to cut the right length for our insidiously small wood-burner. So I try sliding it with one hand, I try kicking it a bit with my foot, I try invoking the spirit of the tree it once was. And all the while I’m grateful to be alone as my mojo is ground into so much sawdust.

Splitting the thicker pieces usually involves the same sort of Marx Brothers routine. No matter how carefully I set the short section of log on its end, it rarely stays there long enough for me to hammer a wedge into it and split it in half. I won’t go into the silent humiliation, rarely witnessed by others but just as poignant nonetheless, of hefting my sledgehammer and swinging at the perfectly balanced log and wedge only to miss.

All this is just shooting fish in a barrel compared to cutting down a tree. Live trees have much more creative ways of fighting back than logs. They position themselves on awkward slopes near your house. They drop dead branches on your head while you’re cutting. Even in the throes of death they will twist as they fall - see you in hell, you can almost hear the branches curse as they plummet towards you. Taking down these wily bastards is an art in itself, and although I’ve mastered it enough to tackle the smaller ones on my own, I don’t mess with any tree that’s too big for me to hug. We have a few of those that need to go this winter, and that’s where Francois comes in.

I keep putting off calling Francois. He’s a pleasant and kind man, and is one of the best tree cutters around. He doesn’t grossly overcharge me, and he is always ready with a smile, friendly conversation and expert advice. At least, I think so. I can’t understand a word Francois says.

Having trouble following all of a conversation is a pretty common problem when you live abroad and speak the language imperfectly. There are always moments when you have to ask people to repeat themselves, and the French, at least around here, are usually pretty obliging. But you can only ask for so many repetitions before people start speaking to you very loudly, which for the record really doesn’t help at all. So then you’re left with piecing together the words you do you know and filling in the gaps with your best guesses based on context.

After a while you start to watch out for the telltale puzzled looks, awkward silences and nervous laughter that warn you when you’ve guessed wrong. These looks, like the toes bruised from logs falling on them or the singed hairs on my hand after an awkward encounter with the wood-burner, are the daily reminders of how much we still have to learn here. At one time Sophia and I spent our days bringing our expensive educations to bear on the arcane complexities of corporate law. Now we find ourselves struggling for mere competence in the daily necessities of living in so raw and unmediated a place.

I’ll get around to calling Francois. I’ll ask him when he can drop by, and he’ll say something like behn, damang, fang de matinay in his gruff, rapid-fire Cassagnes farmer’s twang of which, on a good day, I can make out one word in four. And I’ll say sure, great, see you then, and be forced by my own cowardice to hang around the house for days hoping that he hadn’t actually suggested an afternoon in February.

And when he does arrive, and is in the process of pointing at various trees and emitting strings of sound that I’m sure could be resolved, with enough time, into something resembling the French language, I’ll start to feel tempted. Perhaps cutting down big trees is actually less challenging than deciphering the local dialect. Next year, maybe I can start taking a shot at the trickier ones myself.

The temptation won’t last though. A day or two later I’ll be cutting firewood again. Between bursts of sawing, the familiar sound of English expletives will drift across the fields and woodlands around our house. Francois’s work will be safe for another year.

A Visit with Badger

I walked this morning.

I do it less often than I care to admit. On the occasional winter morning, however, when feeling distracted or restless, I put on the silly hat that I can only wear because wild boar can’t laugh, grab my favorite walking stick à la Bilbo Baggins, and head into the woods.

The sheep were quiet this morning and the frost was just leaving the fields as I passed the neighboring farm. The mist seemed to block out almost all sound other than my own footsteps and the occasional rooster, and by the time I had wound down the little dirt path and reached the valley floor I felt myself in another world. The path then joins a larger track – this one just wide enough for Gerard the baker to ride his quad bike on the disturbingly rare days he leaves the bakery – and I turned left. The woods here are young, mostly hornbeam with a scattering of obligingly gnarled oaks, and visible among the now leafless trees wind rows and rows of crumbling stone. This is all that’s left of the retaining walls that would a century ago have supported the terraced plots of a thriving vineyard.

Especially in winter it’s hard not to detour now and then to explore among the old walls looking for abandoned farm equipment or hidden cave entrances. Today I found a badger set. No sign of the badger of course – he was I’m sure staunchly holed up deep in his cave, protected on all sides by cold gray stone and packed earth, wondering what strange smelling creature was lurking at the gates of his little underground kingdom. So I left him in peace and continued on my way, past the overgrown ruins of an old stone barn, skirting the edge of a young walnut grove, until the path forks. Here I examined for perhaps the tenth time a large battered stone which I am convinced is a flint core from which prehistoric men chipped the raw material for their arrow heads and scrapers (bear with me, it’s just plausible enough…).

The flint core tells me it’s time to stop. I’ve gone farther, many times, through the little hamlet I know lies ahead and beyond. I am probably no more than a mile from home as the crow flies. But here my comfort zone ends, and today I’m not up for an adventure among foreigners. They are border people – not far beyond them lies the frontier with the Dordogne. I just can’t face it.

The funny thing is that I’m only half-joking. One of the corollaries to living in such a slow and remote place is that your sense of local begins to contract. It’s not really so much a question of physical distance – in the countryside you inevitably are obliged to drive farther afield for shops and services than you would living in a city or suburb. But the psychological and cultural territory seems still to correspond to the old feudal boundaries. Like the skeletons of the old vineyards and the leftover stone-age tools, the ghosts of small scale feudalism still leave their mark on the human landscape.

Our part of the Quercy occupies the northwestern corner of the Lot, and borders on two other provinces, the Lot-et-Garonne and the Dordogne. These new administrative borders, arbitrary though they may look on a map, have huge local significance. Our tourist information office, for example, carries almost no information about sites a mere 20 minute drive away, simply because they are on the wrong side of the border. Collecting information for our holiday cottages we must go to three different offices to get pamphlets on all the nearby happenings during the summer tourist season.

But it’s more than bureaucracy. The local economies are different. People smile less over there. And then there’s the driving - people from the Lot-et-Garonne are terrible, aggressive drivers, at least by our standards over here in the Lot. The last two numbers on French licence plates reveal which district the car is registered in, and we have learned from experience that when you see car with that tell-tale 47 plate, you’d better give them a wide berth.

Even the smaller scale feudal territories present some startling contrasts. Take language. They all speak French, right? Behn oui, any of the old timers here will tell you, but they don’t speak the same French in Cassagnes as they do in Montcabrier. Cassagnes is a small village of about 200 souls, a little over an hour’s walk away. Each of these tiny villages have their own dialect, their own character. And don’t talk to a hunter from Montcabrier about the Cassagnes hunting association. Savages, every last man of them.

It’s a contagious frame of mind, and even foreigners (I mean real foreigners, not just the ones from other villages) who have moved here find themselves acquiring both the folk-wisdom and folk-folly of their adoptive village. It is at times surreal to listen to English and Dutch people talking about the micro-climate in Frayssinet-le-Gelat just up the road (it’s too cold for wisteria to grow there, our English neighbor assured us) or the big-village airs put on by the shop girls in Prayssac. I get it most when I’m walking. On foot, every familiar tree stump or pile of rocks is a reaffirmation of belonging, and every unexplored path both an opportunity for adventure and a potential for hidden menace. As much as I enjoy exploring an unfamiliar patch of woods, I find more and more in myself a sense of fellow-feeling with that badger, snugly tucked away in his hole and reluctant to stray very far.

But times change, and younger generation, with their mobile phones and Internet access, are starting to leave some of this feudal attitude behind. Now that several villages must combine to share a school in order to have enough pupils, village cultures are beginning to blend in a sort of micro-globalization. Our own son’s two best friends are from Cassagnes. One of them is the girl he says he want to marry some day.

We’re trying to keep an open mind.

Loto Night

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us.” The quote appeals to me, perhaps because living abroad involves a lot of looking within. Inevitable daily reminders of your own otherness necessitate an almost constant process of self-reevaluation. This week I looked within, and found something unexpected and disturbing. There, among the hopes and fears, the secrets and shadows, lurks a love of bingo.

I was not brought up to love bingo. Bingo is what elderly aunts play on cruise ships and in retirement homes. I’m 38 years old, male, Harvard educated, city-born, and I’m sure for all sorts of other reasons totally outside the bingo paradigm as I have always understood it.

So the sheer delight I felt the other night at our school Loto as I, the operator of the boulier no less, turned the handle, withdrew the numbered plastic balls and handed them to the nursery school teacher to be read out, gave me cause for concern. Sure, it was all dressed up as a quaint rural French tradition called “le Loto,” pronounced “low tow.” I could easily try to intellectualize it as a cultural experience, or write it off as an amusing Peter-Mayle-esque adventure in mingling with the locals, or use it as a pretext to feel smug about having “integrated.” In fact, I’ve done all those things. But even sitting here in my study, surrounded by books, striving to live the part of the intellectual country gentleman, I can’t shake the feeling that the game itself if fun.

The preparations were not. It takes some organizing and some manpower to run a village bingo night. The evening before about a dozen of us, parents and members of the village council, gathered in front of the “Salle de Fetes,” or village hall, and spent the next few hours carrying trestle tables and chairs and even pew benches out of the church and setting them up in the three adjoining rooms of the village hall, the mayor’s office and the larger of the two classrooms of Sebastian’s school. Saturday afternoon was spent organizing all the donated or purchased items into boxes to form prizes for each round of “quine” (one row on your bingo card), “double quine” (you can guess…), or “carton plein” (a full card). Lucky players might go home with just about anything - a DVD player, a coffee maker, vases, corkscrews, a large carved wooden Porcini mushroom, lighting fixtures, homemade pâté. Some of the prizes couldn’t go into boxes, so we wrote out little I.O.U.s for the wild boar haunch courtesy of the Montcabrier Hunters' Association or for the several live chickens, ducks and rabbits donated by farmers.

But once it was all in place, things ran like clockwork. It was a cold night, and the afternoon’s rain was now freezing on the roads, but still they came. An hour before we were scheduled to start, even as we were still divvying up the cash boxes between the desk where the bingo cards were sold and the “café,” the serious players began to arrive. Older women mostly, in comfortable baggy clothing and sporting their own plastified metal chips and magnetized batons with which they could effortlessly gather up the chips at the end of each round. The amateurs arrived a bit later, families with kids in tow, some with their own chips, some scooping up a cupful of dried corn kernels from a sack at the entrance.

My boulier and I were lodged in a corner up on stage, and at the table next to me were several of these hard-core enthusiasts. One deftly managed to spread her chips among 18 bingo cards, despite the surprisingly fast pace at which I drew and the teacher called out the numbers. Another kept turning around to stare at the boulier, and as if to ensure against foul play. Under the pressure of her gaze, each time I pulled out a number I felt inexplicably guilty.

And so for a solid three hours, with one break for coffee and homemade crèpes wrapped in tinfoil, I turned that tumbler and the numbers were called. An occasional wave of excitement or laughter rippled through the crowd as someone called out “quine” or, more often, let out an anguished cry when they missed out on winning by just one number. It was intense and exhausting. When the prizes were all given out, a couple dozen people stayed behind, not just the organizers, but random others as well, to put everything back in place. Trestle tables were disassembled. Church pews returned to their rightful home. The mayor’s desk moved back into place ready for Monday morning. And then, the work done, the crowd dispersed again. I couldn’t help feeling a little sad as we locked the door. On that bleak cold night, far from anything that could be called a city, surrounded by the frosty hush of a country winter, that bright noisy village hall had seemed like the warm center of the universe. The Loto is so popular, I realized, because out here, with so little else going on, it is the ultimate cure for rural loneliness.

The Loto was a big success – we raised a good 3000 euros for the school – and it has a new fan. Despite my lingering suspicion that I had been so readily offered the job of operating the boulier because in it lurked some hidden horror, the only downside had been a painful arm from turning that damned tumbler. And that I had been unable to play. The wild boar haunch, alas, will grace someone else’s table this Christmas.

But in a few weeks the Football Association is hosting its own Loto...