Le pere Noël

We spent the Christmas holiday in the Alps with C's brothers & sisters and their families, and I actually ended up being a bit disappointed in how un-Christmas-like it was.  They weren't into my holiday music or Christmas movies, there were few decorations besides the tree and we didn't have an all-out Christmas dinner like most French families do.  My Christmas cookies were poo-poo'ed (though they did end up liking them in the end). The whole thing just seemed more like any-old weekend than the festive holiday get-together that I was hoping for.   But I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, my in-laws are all very non-traditional and not at all into commercial celebrations.  I just thought that things would be a bit different now that there are young kids in the family...

This was our first Christmas celebrating with C's family though, and I love finding *the* perfect gift for people, so I put a lot of thought and effort into present shopping, especially for the kids.  After opening the gifts, one of our nieces was playing with a gift we gave her, and I started telling her mother where I found it and why, and she interrupted me and said "You mean where SANTA found it".  And I was like - "No, this was a present from us".  And she said "No, you mean from Santa" a little more forcefully. 

I was confused, so once the little one had left the room, I asked what that was all about, and she explained that the kids thought all of the presents had come from Santa.  I couldn't really understand why Santa had to bring every single gift - but her rational was that the kids wouldn't believe in Santa anymore if some gifts came from other people.   But it went as far that even gifts from the neighbors or from the grandparents a few days after Christmas were also from Santa, with the explanation that "Santa made a mistake and dropped them off at our house for you".  I tried to explain that made the whole Santa theory even less credible, because come on - the guy's been delivering presents for millions of kids around the world for years, and he's still making delivery errors??  But she wasn't having it.

I guess my whole problem with this theory is - why it would be so bad for the kids to thank whoever gave them the gift? Growing up, in my family, we had a few presents from Santa and the rest from family members, and we had to go around and say thank you to each person and give them a hug.  And that seems like it would be much more in line with the French obsession with politeness.  Kids are taught to do the "bise" before they can even talk, and "hello, goodbye, please and thank you" are drilled into them once they do start talking, so what's wrong with showing gratitude for a gift? 

We had a NYE party at our place last night, and one of my French friends confirmed it was the same in her family, and said again "But they wouldn't believe in Santa if we didn't do that".  So I'm curious how things are done in other French families and if it is a French tradition I just haven't come across yet?  I guess there are still things for me to learn about French culture even after 12 years here!  I'd also be curious to hear how things are done in other countries that celebrate Christmas (or other bi-cultural families in France), so please leave a comment below.

Se faire belle

My SIL and her children stayed with us for a very hectic five days (the amount of noise and mess two small kids can produce is really quite incredible).  My niece is at the age though where everything princess rules.  Pink dresses, tutus, crowns, wands - you name it, she loves it. 

Her mother and grandmother are very earthy and don't really bother with external appearances at all, so whenever she comes to see us, she is always extremely interested in my make-up products, nail polish, etc.  She would sit quietly with me every morning while I got ready, just watching me, and sometimes asking questions about what I was doing or using.

Her main question though was Why?  Why are you putting on makeup? Why are you doing your hair?  Why do you paint your nails?  My immediate answer was "pour me faire belle", or to make myself beautiful, but then I thought - what on Earth kind of message is that sending to a young girl?  I certainly didn't want her to think that a woman needed to put on makeup in order to be beautiful, but then how do you explain to a 3-4 year old that you can put on makeup to feel better for yourself, and not just for others?  Or trying to delicately answer that I used mascara to darken my eyelashes without making it seem like it was bad if you didn't do that, especially since her mother doesn't.  But it still didn't stop her from asking "Can I wear makeup?  Can you do my hair? Can you paint my nails pink?"

The whole time she was here, I kept thinking back to an article I read some time ago that brought up the different vocabulary used with boys and girls.  Boys are often told they are strong and smart while girls are told they are pretty or good.  And it's something I've been very conscious about ever since.  I mean, it's true - it must be so much more difficult to motivate girls to excel in academics or sports if they are mainly lauded for their looks or how they act.  Even as an adult, I'm not really anything special but still most of the compliments I get tend to be more looks-related and not accomplishment-related. But luckily I have some pretty great girlfriends and blog readers who also recognize how hard I've worked. ;)

Anyways, I know a lot of you out there currently have or have raised girls, so I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on this and how you dealt or have dealt with these sorts of questions.

Bringing up Crazy

I wasn't originally planning on writing about this topic at all, because 1) I don't have kids and 2) It just seemed like another one of those "X country does Y thing better" books. But then I saw an interview with the author on the Today Show, and it kind of irked me.  They filmed her in Paris, wearing a beret of course.  She talks about how French parents have a well-defined "box" of rules, but that there is freedom inside that box. They show her kids eating broccoli and she of course takes credit for this - whereas my first thought was whatever lady - that ain't thanks to you, that's thanks to the French school lunch system. Kids here learn to eat a wide variety of foods from a very young age. And then she shows up live on the Today Show (again with the damn beret!) to expound on her previous statements.

As an interesting side note - in the US, this book is called "Bringing Up Bébé", whereas in the UK, it's called "French Children Don't Throw Food".  I find it really interesting that they felt the need to change the name for the British market.  But then again, ever since I moved to France, all I have heard from the Brits is how well-behaved French children are.

I've always wondered where that myth comes from.  I mean, sure maybe the French children of 50 years ago were meant to be seen and not heard, but in my experience, after living in France for coming up on 9 years now, that is definitely not the case.  I've taught in the French school system and been around plenty of children in Fab's family and now in C's family, and frankly, I don't understand what the big fuss is about.  The kids just seem like normal kids.  Sometimes they're good and sweet and sometimes they scream, whine and throw fits.

And hey, if all French kids are so perfect,  why would M6 need to have a SuperNanny show?  It was extremely popular, and ran for six years - and would probably still be on today if the SuperNanny hadn't passed away in 2010.  I watched some of them, and man, did some of those kids need an attitude adjustment.

I also found it extremely ironic that she said that French parents insisted their children always say "Hello" to others, as a way to pull them out of their self-centeredness and remind them that others have needs too.  This literally made me laugh out loud.  If that were indeed the case, they would also be reminding their kids to hold the doors for others, to not stand in the middle of the sidewalk/doorway/escalators and to not stare.  But none of that happens - France is not a "Put yourself in someone else's shoes" society.  And before anyone starts on me for criticizing France, it's not a criticism, it's the way people are raised here. If anything, they are teaching their kids to say "Hello" because it's a cultural expectation and you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of non-service if you don't start every sentence with "Bonjour".

She also brings up the example of a child interrupting a parent. She says that Americans think that there is nothing that they can do about a child interrupting and so they just have to live with it.  Um hello? (or should that be Bonjour?).  I grew up with my mother telling me all the time to stop interrupting and wait until her conversation was done.  This lady just seems like her parenting skills weren't that great to start off with.  She says however that a French parent will take the time to gently explain the child needs to wait.  I don't know about you guys, but this has not been my experience at all.  I've mainly seen the kids saying "Maman. Maman. Maman. Mamaaaaannnnn" with increasing urgency, all the while the parent is ignoring them until the explode and say "Come on Quentin, stop being so annoying, can't you see that I'm talking?". And then the kid sulks away, pouting.

Which brings me to the whole yelling factor.  That is one of the biggest differences I have noticed in child-adult interactions here.  So much of it seems to be adults yelling at the children and belittling them into submission. Not that I think the kids suffer from it, just that it is not seen as necessarily a bad thing to call a child stupid or tell them they asked a dumb question.

In fact, I found this whole idea of "French parents are calm" so ridiculous that I posted it on twitter.  Here are some of the answers I got back:

ChezLoulou: Oh r-e-a-l-l-y? Then why is that I hear French parents yelling at their kids all the time?
Ella: Lol! She should spend a weekend at MF's family's house and she'd write a whole other book! Where is she getting her facts?
Ashley: ugh. Read lots of things about that book. Sound like a complete over generalization of one population. yuck.
AnnMah: Ha ha. I think this is the newest "X parenting is superior." But that it's French, does make me laugh.
KarenLeBillon: French aren't perfect, but DO have gr8 approach to #kidsfood. See amazing French school menus! bit.ly/xrcoDm

There were a few detractors however:
TheBoldSoul: I think they do it less than American parents, frankly. And the French little ones ARE generally better behaved in public
Ednacz: I think they do it less than American parents, frankly. And the French little ones ARE generally better behaved in public

So that leads me to believe that there are both well-behaved and misbehaved kids here, just as there are in every other country in the world. But I thought I'd put together a little quiz to see what the rest of you think:


Update - It's also crazy that she has removed her past books from her website, including the one on infidelity. According to a commenter below, she also asked Marie Claire to remove her article on how she gave her husband a threesome for his 40th birthday.  And we're supposed to take parenting advice from this lady??

Sorry for the lack of posts - I've been in all four corners of MN in the past week, which has meant endless of hours of driving (many through mountains of snow). And now I am up in NE Minnesota, helping my mother move into her new house.

Moving sucks on any day, but in freezing temperatures, it's even less fun. Add to that the fact that my mother seems to have been in denial about having to move and thus had not packed a single box when I showed up. She just doesn't seem to see the urgency in this - when I woke up this AM, she'd been up for 2 1/2hrs and had spent the whole time surfing the internet instead of packing/moving. WTF?? Let me point out here that we only have 2 days to pack & move her entire house, and that the builders haven't yet finished the new house so we really have no place to put everything over there. I believe this may be what hell looks like.

On the positive side, I made about 150 trips up and down the stairs yesterday carrying heaving things, so at least this is serving as my work-out for the day/week/month.

Always end on a positive note, right?

**Oops, mean to post this Friday but got caught up in all the wedding festivities**


I made it safely to America and then promptly got in a car and drove 5 1/2hrs up North. I arrived at my destination at 5:30am French time. And I then proceeded to go out & party like it was 1999 for the next six hours. Yes, I am crazy. And now also really tired. But I desperately wanted to attend my cousin's bachelorette party - I miss out on so much family stuff by being over in France.

Despite the tiredness though, I'm so glad I went - I had a fabulous time with my cousins and their friends. We've always gotten along well, but the older we get, the more fun we have.

Though what's a bachelorette party with out a little drama?

They neglected to tell me this, but one of the attendees had just been released from rehab and wasn't supposed to be drinking...but she'd been sneaking drinks all night and no one had realized it. By the time I started chatting with her at the third bar, she was already pretty buzzed. But so was everyone else, so I didn't even give it a second glance. People were buying us shots left and right, and I started giving her some of mine - given that it was around 8am French time and I had yet to go to bed, I was trying to pace myself.

The bars closed at 2am, so we moved on to a club to go dancing. I lost track of her for a while, and it turns out it was because she was practically comatose in the corner. When it was time to go, she could barely stand up, so I took her outside to get some fresh air. She sat there hugging a tree and shaking while everyone else regrouped. It was at that point that I learned she had a substance abuse problem. Doh. Her parents ended up coming to get her and her mother yelled at the bride and blamed it all on her. The drunk girl got upset with her mother and refused to get in the car. The two of them started yelling and caused a major scene, at which point the bouncer came out to see what all the fuss was.

Meanwhile, I was missing out on all of this because I was talking to an Irishman (I thought of you Miss Leyla!). What on Earth an Irishman was doing in Grand Forks, ND, I'll never know. We were chatting and he jokingly called another one of my cousin's a bitch - except she misunderstood and thought he'd called me a bitch and started chewing him out. Everyone else joined in and pretty soon the poor Irish boy was surrounded by the bridal party and had no idea what had hit him. At that point, my uncle arrived (my aunt was supposed to be the designated driver, but we had her doing shots all night) and all the girls started jabbering at him at once, and so then he started in on the Irishman too.

I'm not sure if someone called the cops or if a squad car just happened to be driving by, but the policeman took one look at the two scenes we were causing and promptly got out of his vehicle. At which point I decided it was probably best if we got out of there, so I started herding everyone over to the car. I'm pretty sure we got out of there just in time, because things were heating up between the Irishman and the policeman as we drove away.

I thought the whole thing was hilarious, though maybe it was just jetlag-induced hilarity. My whole family is usually so composed, so it was funny to see them all in such a drunken state. I can already tell it's going to become a family legend, and I'm so glad I got to see it firsthand instead of just hearing about it via email!

Lord help me, but as time goes on, I'm slowly turning into my mother. I see it in the little ways - from my obsessive picture taking of the same thing (me: the eiffel tower, her: fall foliage). I can still hear myself as a child saying "But mom - the leaves change color every year. You have albums and albums of the exact same pictures!"

Or in the way that I have friends and acquaintances all over France, Europe & the US. And in the way that I make an effort to cultivate and keep those friendships. It used to drive me crazy as a child that no matter where we went, she always ran into someone she knew - which for me, meant standing there and having to be patient while she chatted. But now I find myself doing the same - making connections, bringing people together.

Funnily enough, my mother always told me my name meant "patience", something I was often in short supply of until moving to France. Though google disagrees and says it means "listener" in Aramaic.

I suppose it's inevitable that we all end up in some way like our mothers (or fathers) - it's just not something I ever pictured myself doing. My mother felt like she'd had a very unfair childhood growing up as the oldest child of an immigrant family, and in many ways, I paid for that. She was often selfish and she was a workaholic. She was very hard on me - pushing me to constantly do more and do better. I never got pocket money or an allowance from her, I was always told that if I wanted money, I had to earn it myself. So I started working from a very early age - at 12 - in order to have some financial freedom. To be able to buy clothes and cassette tapes like my friends. The same party line continued on when I went to college and I worked 30-40 hours per week to pay my way through school. Not that I'm complaining here - I absolutely loved the jobs I had in college and wouldn't have traded them for the world. And it made me self-sufficient. Independent. Able to take care of myself. I couldn't really say the same for my college roommate, who, as lovely as she was, seemed to think that money only came from the ATM.

But all of this meant that I resented my mother for a good portion of my youth - she was so tough on me and so easy on my brother. My father was my refuge, the one who always comforted and encouraged me - which was why it was even doubly harder for me when he passed away. It was often an "us against them" mentality, and I had lost my "us".

I don't know what's made me think about all this lately - maybe watching MJ's poor children having to deal with the death of their father in the public eye. Maybe my impending trip to the US, in which I know I'll be spending time a lot of time with her. And the thing is, since my father died, she's changed. Softened with time. Regrets that we don't have that typical mother/daughter relationship. It's so strange now for me to see her almost try to buy my love, and it's almost laughable to hear her offer to buy me a plane ticket home after so many years of extreme tight-fistedness.

Part of time thinks it's too late to change - almost 30 years of interactions can be a hard habit to break. But part of me thinks we have to - she's my only remaining parent. Many people out there no longer have that, including some of you reading this. And because of you, I think of what will happen when she's gone. I'm so far away and I don't want to have any regrets.

So this time around, I'm vowng to try to be more open. More patient. To talk more about my life. To appreciate what I can learn from her. And to accept her as she is.

It turns out that my family is sort of upset this year that I asked them to give my present money to charity. Not by the principal of it, but by the actuality - they are really bothered by the fact that that means I don't have any presents to open. Which has resulted in them buying me a bunch of small "crap" gifts. I keep telling them to stop, that I don't need any of this stuff. Nor do I have room for it (in my suitcase or my apartment). I haven't even done that much shopping myself - most of this trip has been about spending time with family and eating all the things I miss while in France (though I did raid my mom's jewelry store and I bought a new dress for Miss Leyla's upcoming wedding). And I'm currently going through all of the clothes I shipped back to the US in April, and it's like Christmas all over again - finding clothes that I'd completely forgotten I had. Including my winter coat - I froze those past few weeks in Paris, but I didn't want to spend money on a coat when I had a perfectly good one at home.

So 2008 was all about the down-sizing and I'm planning on continuing that into 2009 as well. But will someone please remind me of that when the soldes start in just a few weeks?? Me + sales = bad news. I'm trying to limit myself to just buying a pair of dark grey boots though, to replace the ones I had to throw out - I literally wore the soles off of my old ones while walking around London Thanksgiving weekend!

80 and fabulous

My grandma absolutely rocks. She just turned 80 and is still going strong. She lives on the farm with my uncle and gets up at 4am everyday to milk the cows.



She's like super-grandma, she lifts weights every morning, can do one-handed push-ups and she can juggle like a mad woman. She cross country-skis the half-mile down to the mailbox and back every day during the winter.

And so I sit here, listening to her talk to my mom and my aunts in Finnish, and I think "Man, I'm so lucky I got to come home for Christmas this year."



When my grandmas moved to the US, there were no planes, she had to come by boat to New York and then by train the rest of the way to MN. They didn't have a phone, so she wasn't able to call home at the drop of a hat. She didn't get to fly back to Finland once a year, and email and internet were still decades off from being invented. She went years without talking to her family.



All things considered, us expats have it pretty easy nowadays, huh?



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Lord help me, my mother arrived today and will be staying until I leave on Thursday....this is my reminder to myself that despite how over-bearing she is, she means well and thinks she has my best interests at heart.