Five Christmases in France

Where food is more important than presents

My daughters are like me: rationally practical, probably to a fault.  Once they were old enough that they no longer believed in Santa and the magic of Christmas, they agreed with me that there was not much point in buying expensive presents for each other just for the sake of exchanging gifts on a specific day.  When they were younger, in the pre-teen years, I would buy presents when I saw them, often at second- hand stores, and hide them in my bedroom closet: not for Christmas, but for when they were needed.  After a particularly bad week at school, after losing a friend, after not being selected for the team or the school play.  When the girls were older, they preferred having an annual large gift from me (a new guitar or phone for example) when they needed and wanted it rather than waiting for Christmas. 

Our Christmas traditions centered on getting a large (almost touching the ceiling) and fragrant tree, decorating it together, and putting small a few small wrapped gifts on the red decorated apron beneath it.  One memorable winter we trudged through the snow (at a tree farm) and cut the tree ourselves.  The rest of our pre-Christmas preparation time involved making Christmas cookies.  Ours are basic rolled and cut sugar cookies with buttercream frosting, creatively and sometimes obsessively decorated, with tweezers and toothpicks.  We spent at least one whole day together making and decorating them while listening to Christmas music.

By long tradition (their dad and I divorced before they were old enough to remember us ever living together), Christmas Eve was at my place: hot chocolate and Christmas music in front of the tree, the girls going to bed, then I would wrap presents while he filled their stockings and snuck them onto their beds so they would find them when they woke up.  He would stay over so we could both enjoy their surprise on Christmas morning, and their adorable comments on Santa and what he brought.  Christmas Day we would move to his place for more present opening followed by Daddy’s famous traditional British Christmas dinner, complete with Christmas crackers.  He’s Welsh, which may have something to do with why we always had a perfectly cooked lamb roast with mint sauce along with roast potatoes and parsnips, brussels sprouts, Paxo stuffing, and gravy.  Dessert was a real Christmas pudding, usually purchased at World Market, served with brandy cream sauce. 

My experience with more American Christmas meals comes from my Dad and stepmom, who host a large gathering for both a Christmas Eve dinner and a Christmas Day lunch with prime rib slow roasted on the grill.  Both of these meals are important in France as well.  The Christmas Eve dinner is called le Réveillon and the Christmas Day dinner is the repas de Noël, the Christmas meal. 

In my French family, Christmas traditions are centered on shared meals and planning for the Réveillon and the repas de Noël starts in the first week of December.  Each meal will have an entrée (appetizer), plat (main dish), accompagnement (side dish, usually vegetable based), and dessert.  Which traditional Christmas foods will feature where is negotiated between Christian, his parents, and his sister, with some input from me. When Christian’s parents were the ones making the repas de Noël, there were always two plats with accompagnements: a fish course and a meat course, with the trou Normand in between.

The trou Normand is a palate cleanser, a small scoop of lemon or lime sorbet with a tablespoon or so of a strong (40%) alcohol. The Normandy version would be served with Calvados, an apple brandy. We have had the trou Normand several times before or after the bûche, just because, with a wide selection of liqueurs offered: Calvados, Chartreuse, Poire William (pear brandy), kirsch (sour cherry brandy), and so on. Technically none of these are brandy, which is made from grapes. They are versions of eau de vie, the water of life: distilled liqueurs made the same way as brandy is, but with any fruit other than grapes. Christian’s father’s cousin, now in his 80s, inherited the legal right to operate a still on the farm and he makes his own. This year he brought a bottle of pear eau de vie, another of plum, and a bottle of his homemade vin de noix, walnut wine.

Both Christian and his sister wanted to simplify things this year and to spend as little time as possible cooking.  I pushed back a little, since cooking is my favorite hobby.  Even after five years, I don’t think that Christian really believes that I actually enjoy it. I got him to finally agree on my choices for the entrees: home made foie gras for le Reveillon and home made gravlax (instead of storebought smoked salmon) for Christmas day.  Gravlax is Scandinavian cured salmon with dill, pictured below served with mache, and it was a big hit.  It’s ridiculously easy to make and takes less than 15 minutes of prep time, plus 48 hours to cure and rest.  I’ll post my recipe tomorrow.

The foie gras was also a big hit. I’ve perfected my recipe for that as well, and I hope to offer a class on how to make it at some point this year in Minneapolis. 

For the main dish of le Reveillon, Christian made a gratin du poisson et fruits de mer.  He arranged cod filets in the bottom of a baking dish, one per person, covered them with a layer of various small crustaceans (shrimp, tiny mussels, scallops, pieces of squid, etc.) and then cooked the whole thing in the oven covered in a bechamel sauce.  The side dish with that was green beans.  After that came the cheese course (four to six different kinds of cheese passed around on serving plates), then fruit (clementines from Corsica are in season and delicious).  Dessert was light: a box of small but excellent chocolates passed around the table twice, each person choosing one each time.  We had already eaten a big lunch earlier in the day (with a leg of goat), and would be having have the Christmas meal tomorrow at noon.  

The menu for the repas de Noël, for which we had 11 people (all family), was gravlax for the entrée, roast of wild boar (sanglier) with gratin dauphinois for the main dish and side (both shown above), cheese, fruit, chocolate, and finally the one item that never changes in Christian’s family: la bûche de Noël, the traditional Christmas yule log.  I heard several people comment this year that “It’s not Christmas without la bûche.”

Ours is made by from scratch by Christian’s sister, and is as traditional as it gets, using a 40-year-old recipe in her mother’s handwriting.  She makes the thin cake and bakes it, adds a layer of chestnut cream or seedless raspberry jam, and rolls it into the log shape.  The ends are trimmed and put on top to look like knots or tree branch joints.  The final step is a chocolate and cream ganache, with fork tracings etched into it to look like bark, and finally Christmas decorations with powdered sugar snow. 

Christian’s sister lives in Paris, and she was sad to report this year that the traditional bûche is very had to find.  It’s been almost completely replaced by fancier layered rectangles that are still called bûches, like this one that we purchased for Christian’s mother’s birthday on December 22^nd.

It was made with layers of vanilla sponge cake, vanilla cream, chestnuts, and black current jam (cassis), and it was delicious.    

Meal planning also includes wines, and luckily for me Christian knows how to choose them.  Both meals start with the apéro – I’ve been meaning to write about the apéro for a while, so more on that in the next post.  Both times we had champagne for the apéro, served with savory petits fours baked in the oven.  We had white wine (Entre-deux-Mers) with the fish-based main course on Christmas Eve, and an excellent red wine (a 2002 Pommard) with the sanglier on Christmas Day.  Since this is France and not the US, one bottle of wine was plenty in each case for the 5 to 8 people who were drinking alcohol. 

Traditional French Christmas foods that did not make it on meal planning list this year but that we have included in the past are oysters, escargots, scallops, langoustines (flambeed with cognac and served in lobster sauce), lotte (monkfish) à l’amoricaine, terrine du lapin (rabbit terrine), galantines, boudin blanc, and cardons – a thistle like relative of artichoke that is a regional specialty. All of the Christmas recipes (except my gravlax contribution) have been passed down through generations, coming from ancient homemaking magazines or notebook pages handwritten by Christian’s grandmother or great aunts.

Christian’s choice of sanglier this year is a deviation from what his family (and many French families) normally have as the centerpiece of the repas de Noël, which is turkey or chapon.  Keep in mind that the French don’t have Thanksgiving, so Christmas is likely the only time in the year when they will roast a turkey – a smallish one by American standards, since our large ones wouldn’t fit in a French oven.  The other default option is a chapon – a castrated rooster that has been raised to larger than normal size. 

Roast turkey from a previous Christmas, sold like most high quality poultry in France with the head still attached.

In both cases, the birds are prepared with stuffing, but the French version of stuffing is woefully disappointing for someone who thinks that stuffing is the best part of the Thanksgiving meal.  French stuffing is made with seasoned meat and nothing else – no bread, no onions, no sage.  The version that Christian’s dad makes has ground pork, pork liver, the turkey giblets, garlic (not enough to cover the taste of the liver) and lots of black mushrooms (trompettes de la mort).  Various meat stuffings are sold at butcher shops in the days before Christmas, like this one:

After my first Christmas turkey with his family, I started making and bringing my own stuffing as an alternative option, one that turned out to be very popular with everyone at the table under the age of 30.

Besides the stuffing, another thing that has been difficult for me to adapt to with Christmas in France is the timing.  I am culturally very Minnesotan in that my ideal dinner time is 6pm or 6:30, and I am usually in bed by 10.  The Reveillon meal has never started before 8pm, and that’s the apéro.  It’s always close to midnight by the time we are finishing the meal, and then there are dishes to be done, the table to be cleared, and so on.  The first two years I was with Christian’s family, we started opening presents after midnight on Christmas Eve. I struggled to stay awake.  Luckily for me, Christian’s daughter is now in a long-term relationship and spends Christmas Eve with her in-laws, coming to join us with her partner on Christmas Day.  As a result, presents are now opened in the evening on Christmas Day, after the big meal.

There are no Christmas cookies in France.  I showed my French family a few American websites with titles like “The 100 Best Christmas Cookie Recipes” and they were astonished – both by the variety of options, and by the idea that families could consume dozens of cookies over the holidays.  I once made my traditional iced sugar cookies with my stepchildren in Lyon and we brought them to Christmas dinner.  My stepdaughter encouraged me to make many of them with less frosting than the thick layer that I normally slather on, but still - no one ate them.  People tried one to be polite, but the cookies were universally described as far too sweet.  I ended up eating almost the entire batch myself.

Instead of cookies, there are chocolates: the standard ones purchased in grocery stores (especially papillotes or boxes like Lindt’s Champs Elysees) or the fine chocolates mentioned above.  Christian brings the best chocolates from Lyon, city of gastronomy (chocolates that we waited 50 minutes in line to buy), and his sister brings the best chocolates from Paris, capital of French culture.  There is an annual discussion of which are better.  In the image below, Lyon is first, then Paris.

Both are amazing, by far the best chocolates I’ve ever eaten.  But portions are small.  Unlike Christmas cookies, the chocolates are eaten in moderation: only at the end of a meal, only when everyone is together, and only two or three per person.  My American habit of casually eating a Christmas cookie alone, standing at the kitchen counter, whenever I feel like it during the day, is literally unimaginable in Christian’s family.

There is also no Christmas music, but I suppose the fact that it took me several years to notice shows that I don’t miss it much.  Christmas music is just not a thing in France – not played in stores, or on the radio, or in people’s homes.  I asked Christian about well known Christmas songs and he pulled up a 1946 song by Tino Rossi called “Petit Papa Noël.”  Okay, Christian is in his 50s… Maybe Google will help.  Several searches with different terms turned up the same top ten list of French Christmas songs.  The most recent was recorded in 2005: “Mon Plus Beau Noël” by Johnny Hallyday, the French equivalent of Elvis in terms of fame and popularity.  The other nine were written and/or recorded between the 15^th century (!) and 1978.

The part of American Christmas that I miss the most is the tree.  For me, nothing says Christmas like the smell of fresh pine when you come home.  Very few people of the people that I know in France have a live tree.  We set up the same small artificial one every year at his parent’s house.

Christian doesn’t want a real tree both for ecological reasons (he’s convinced that a plastic tree that you keep for 30 years is better for the environment) and because of the mess made by dropped pine needles.  I have to say though, the little fake one drops a surprising number of plastic needles each year that have to be vacuumed up anyway.

In 2020 I decided to ignore his opinion and buy a real tree.  It was December 4^th, and I was putting on my coat to go and get one small enough that I could carry it home by myself when he got the call that his parents had both been diagnosed with Covid, an event that upended most of our holiday plans.

It's been ten years since I had a real tree.  My daughters have moved out and understandably haven’t come for Christmas since I’ve been spending them in France.  I gave away our boxes of decorations and the red tree skirt with gold trim that I’d had since my oldest daughter’s first Christmas in 1999. 

I’m grateful to be able to spend Christmas with my French family, but after five years it feels like time to think about spending it in Minnesota.  I’m happy to trade Christmas cookies for amazing chocolates (albeit in tiny quantities) and I’m fine without Christmas music.  But I’m not giving up on the hope of having a real tree sometime soon, and spending another Christmas with my daughters.  Maybe this year.