winter wonderland

ok... so there’ve been all sorts of holidays going on around here these last days.

first off... i believe it was on the 13th there was the branch christmas get together. a little pageant, and a few things to snack on (mostly different cakes, pies and cookiesque items).

on the 24th, we had a nice little evening here at home. whitney filled you in on that already, in about as much detail as there was to give. except that the power went out in the afternoon... for about 3 hours. the main level of the building had power, but not anywhere else. so we all gathered around the staircase to talk about the power being out, and to speculate about why it had happened... and why the devil the main floor still had power. then there was turning off all the breakers, and then systematically turning each one back on until the offending apartment was found. (i believe they were out for the evening, and they just decided to leave the breaker off for that place until they could get an electrician to come in and regulate the problem... and as i recall, they weren’t very happy to have their power cut, and were threatening to go to the police over it. our poor concierge... what was he to do? leave the one apartment out, or turn their breaker on and have no juice for the other 29 places in the building?)

christmas day, we were invited to the bigay’s house. they had the whole family there: their four sons (mickaël, sabastien (with his girlfriend, élodie), pierre and yann), réné and florence, ming wan (random chinese friend of the family)... and us. vaitiare, a tahitian girl in the branch, was invited too, but unable to come. we had a right regular french christmas: oysters, smoked salmon, foie gras... and then for the main course we had duck with a mushroom and creame sauce. dessert was a homemade bûche de noël. uh... you could probably consider a pumpkin roll as being a variation on the bûche de noël: sponge cake with stuff in the middle. it was a raspberry flavored one. we also had american apple pie (provided by the americans...) this came in normal and non-spiced (the french have this thing with spices and not using a lot of them... except garlic. ok that’s not entirely true... but still). we also were invited back for dinner... which was much simpler: salad, zucchini soup and some left over things from meals precedent. we brought a bottle of champomy to share with everyone (it’s like martinelli’s). all in all, a really nice time.

for new year’s eve... we stayed up watching the first two highschool musicals (for lack of other things to watch), and made some apple rhubarb tarts to go with another bottle of champomy. we also had more fun with the power going off... but only in our apartment and the one next door. we’re on the same breaker with the neighbor. for some reason, it decided (for about 10 minutes) to shut itself off every 45 seconds or so. it was doing that a little bit yesterday too... but only like 5 times.

and that’s been our winter holiday season so far. more to come in a few days. :)

the wonderful view from the top of the staircase chez Bigay...

my wifers!

all the dishes left over from the dinner... for 12 people...

the table during dessert time

patrick and whitney chilling in the living room