Christmas Is Coming
And so is winter. I've
discovered that the threshold for when I really wake up to this is
the remembrance ceremony in the village on the 11th of November.
It's quite a low'-key and moving ceremony and always has it's
Clochemerle element with the sound system. It is guaranteed that
either at least once microphones will be off when they should be on
for the speeches or that the recording of the national anthem played
will be out of step with the children from the school who are singing
it. It happens every year and I find it rather endearing. Every
formal ceremony should have its Clochemerle moment.
I know that the advent of
Christmas is heralded in the shops long before then but that is too
early for the perception to really hit home with me. After the
remembrance ceremony, however, three things happen in quick
succession: I get asked to create the Christmas quiz for the Beaumont
library again and I get asked to come to the first rehearsal of the
Christmas carols and those two things remind me to check the number
of Christmas cards I have left over from last year and to think about
presents for family in England. Also, Beaujolais nouveau arrives in
the village.
In fact the first rehearsal
for the Christmas carols was on the 15th of November,
which is when the Beaujolais nouveau arrived at the Bar du Pont. So
immediately after the rehearsal Steve, Jo and I went along to the Bar
du Pont for a tasting. This year I thought it was quite good and
Patrique and Valérie in the bar provided skewers of chicken,
mushrooms and slices of quiche to go with it, all on the house. It
made for a convivial evening.
I had two suggestions to make
for the carols this year. The first was to make more of an
introduction to each carol than the usual “and now we will
sing…..”. I feel there should be more time between each carol.
The second, because we now have a repertoire of over a dozen with
which we are all familiar, whether in English, French, German or
Latin,was to get the audience to chose one of those in the repertoire
but not in the programme. We try to get the audience singing along
with us and this would increase audience participation. I'm not sure
yet whether these will be accepted but have been researching the
history of carols anyway to get the story behind those we will sing.
One interesting point to emerge is that carols weren't sung in
churches in England until late in the 19th century. They
were sung long before then but in the streets, the age old tradition
of wassailing. The word “carol” itself originally meant a dance
in a circle so the origins are specifically jollity rather than
religion. It points up a different attitude to religion between
Britain and France. We Brits sing primarily for the conviviality;
the fact that most, but not all, carols are religious is incidental
to many of us. For the French, the religious connotations can be a
serious inhibition. Many of my French friends who would like to sing
won't join in because of the hard religious-secular divide in France.
I've been creating the
Christmas quiz for the Beaumont library for two years now and have
developed a structure. The total of around 100 questions is divided
into around 10 sections, each section with a theme. After grouping
potential questions under each theme I review them to try to ensure
that there are two hard questions and two dead easy ones in each
section; and therein lies the perennial problem: personal knowledge.
What seems easy or difficult to me isn't necessarily so for anyone
else. I just have to hope that, over 100 questions, the differences
even out.
Another
sign that Christmas is approaching is that Roberto has started
offering a seafood platter, oysters and prawns, as an alternative to
the Monday evening pizzas at the Bar du
Pont. Oysters figure prominently in the
traditional French Christmas meals. And with Christmas comes winter.
Snow is forecast tomorrow down to 1000ft; the
ski station at Mt Serein will be pleased but the road to the summit
of Mt Ventoux is already cut off. I hope
the snow stays up
there. Even so, you can hardly get out of
the village without getting to 1000ft so I'd better check my tyres.
