Good morning and merry Christmas! My earliest–and only consistent–Christmas memory is the smell of oregano and onions wafting through the house for breakfast once Santa had come and gone. We never really cared about Christmas lunch or dinner; for us, the Christmas staple was my mom’s tree-shaped bread filled with bacon and cheese that my siblings and I still try to recreate…
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A few months ago, when I wrote about Julia Child, I highlighted one of my favorite quotes from her memoir: “The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes the time to be friendly.” Let’s revisit this now, because the longer I’m in France the…
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Alternate title: The City Made of Stairs (and the Girl Who Climbed them All) Maybe Christmastime in France is prettier because it is still new and foreign, where signs for “marrons chaud” are still charming instead of banal. But I’m fairly positive it’s mostly because of the lights and markets that take over every city, offering vin chaud and chichis…
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For what seems like years now, I have been telling the sanitized story of Thanksgiving to seemingly hundreds of French students–“The Pilgrims thanked the Indians for all their help and welcoming and they all lived happily ever after, together in America,” paired with a clip or two of Charlie Brown. So…that’s not exactly how it really happened historically, but it is…
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The New York Times published an opinion article yesterday titled “How to be French.” Though the article revolves around the strenuous process of becoming a French citizen, it delves into the–I think–deeper issues of whether your new nationality would finally allow you to know automatically what words are masculine and which are feminine, and, (I assume) give you the superpower to ease into the…
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