Tuesday, June 8, 2010

eUroPEAN SNAps



















CHRISTMAS DAY 2004 PARIS. I have over the years developed my own special relationship with Christmas day. It starts with my own literal understanding of the Mary and Joseph story. Mary created the saviour of mankind while surviving a donkey ride, a man who didn’t book ahead, and with straw for a bed. Hey Joe wasn’t even the father. So who am I to think my Christmas should be any better? For me it’s a celebration of surviving family dis-functionality and still coming up trumps. Christmas is what you put in not what you get.
I had realized earlier in the year that the sharing of the day with my ex had changed so I said to my daughter Antonia that I will not be here on Christmas day. I will be, plucking a town out of the air, I will be in Paris.
My mother had always had Christmas as the head cook and bottle washer and then spent all year telling us the tales of how hard it had been. I offered her and my sister’s family mine and my partner’s country home. It is air-conditioned and dishwasher friendly and should solve a problem or two.
My work list prior to the day was huge and complicated. Daughter happy , step-daughter major throat surgery and on the way back to recovery, sister in place in country residence, mother and father no longer centred and in control mode, oh and yes Janis and I fly to Paris!
With dollars of phone calls to check on all this planning on Christmas Eve it all seemed to have worked. So what have we got planned, for the big day: two loaves of bread, some pate and a bottle of plonk. All our personal presents had been given much earlier: upgrades on fight tickets, a neck lace which was to be presented in front of the Pompidou centre but the receipt had been found in Melbourne and the piece given in London days earlier.
So finally it’s Christmas day. We are greeted by our usual hotel breakfast but this time with a few merry hellos to total strangers. Then, we walk in to the Christmas streets. They are silent calm and of all things, they are sunny. There may be no family guests at this Christmas just an old friend Mademoiselle Paris. She will be our hostess and guide. It feels like we have Paris to ourselves.
We had decided to walk for the day all round Montmartre and being careful of not make this short journey long by taking the wrong turn; we take with us no real expectations, for as the guide books proclaim Paris is shut on Christmas Day.
. To our surprise and joy Montmartre is not shut! The butcher shops are open. Not all people are Christian! The fabric shops are open with Janis friendly tassels. We find things and buy things as families walk by trying to encouraging their offspring to enjoy their gifts of bikes that are impossible to ride on the cobbled streets.
We eventually find ourselves in front of the Moulin Rouge. May be it would look better at night. It has lost most of its charm and is surrounded with porn shops. The porn shops? There’re open. I feel sorry for all the men and women who have to work the sex industry on Christmas day but I suppose they peddle their wares no matter what the day it may be.
There exists in Montmartre the most extraordinary café come deli come food and home ware shore. Glass shelves, spotless, filled with all the most extra ordinary products. On our journey in we had gone past it. We had seen how beautiful it had been presented for Christmas.
The woman who runs it on our last visit to Paris was most difficult to warm to and she was very reluctant to have tourist taste her fare.
“I do not sell coffee” she said forcefully as we tried to sit down.
“Ok what do you sell?”
“Wine”.
“We’ll have wine.” Extra ordinary! Food…. extra extra ordinary! Desert, oh why didn’t we come days ago so we could have eaten more? She was hard work but we complimented her so much she finally cracked a smile. Hey we are super tourists.
So here we are on Christmas day armed with our past experiences we look in through the beautiful displays. She is vacuuming a table. I start to feel a huge lack of confidence coming on. I sense I will bump something and be sent to the back of the shop classroom. Debating about whether to go in, we leave this shop behind and move on and then, the magic of Christmas past.
“We’ll try this restaurant.” It was warm and friendly, comfortably French with an almost family like atmosphere. “Velia” my dead uncle’s favourite song starts to play on the tape machine. I hang my bump possible coat on the hanger in the front window. There’s lots of space to move. We have a great Christmas lunch while all the time for some strange reason the place kept reminding me of my uncle.
The food, the décor the general charm of the place my uncle would have loved it. As the meal ends a moment of pure joy happens. I see in the reflection of a mirror a man and his male entourage leaving. They all had been in the more elegant back part. “My god he is Uncle Bill ……..the second!”
This man’s pale blue full length coat and star rap around glasses made him more french looking but in essence it was Bill. A man on the next table to us told us in broken English that this gentleman was an actor a singer and like my uncle Bill owned his own theatre. My uncle had died 18 months ago and yet I felt I had had Christmas with him again.
Does Christmas get any better?
It does! Walking back to the hotel we take a wrong turn and it is now impossible to find a toilet. The great tourist rush hour begins. Read a map badly. Walk fast and do not bump into the drug pushers in the parks you cut across in the vain hope to hasten the journey. Finally the hotel is in sight. Relief. A bath. It is dark but it is only 5.30pm and it is still Christmas. Perhaps a concert for 18euro? It is being held near Notre Dame. Hello! Notre Dame! High mass! Christmas!
We walk in with thousands of other people and stand for an hour and half under the north rose window 10 meters from the high alter. Within this holy place in full swing with all its music and incense – it feels as if my head will explode with pure joy.
A beautifully expressed sermon in another language by a black priest and an organ, which on leaving seems to want to extend the walls of this building beyond their foundations all add to the total experience. We leave almost by the side door. No, this is Christmas we leave by the centre main door. We see a huge Christmas tree in the front square and thousands of peace loving people in the distance. We see the Eiffel tower.
This is Mademoiselle Paris at her best. All I wanted now was for my family to have these experiences. In the years to come I will read this and maybe by proxy we can all have a Parisian Christmas.
P.S. as I experienced all this the Tsunami in south east-Asia happened. I can say only that when life is good
Love it,
Live it and share it for it is over all too soon.



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