Have you noticed that you can’t buy Charlie Brown Christmas Trees anymore? All the trees on the lots are perfect, full and symmetrical and ruthlessly trimmed so that not a branch is out of place. They are not the trees of my childhood that’s for sure. It wasn’t Christmas without mum and dad bickering over the tree. I can even remember dad drilling holes in the trunk and ‘grafting in’ branches to make some sad little specimen he’d dragged home look a little fuller. And while I’m on the subject of trees, when did everyone start color coordinating their trees? Worse yet, having themed trees? Christmas trees should be filled with ornaments handed down though the generations, they should be hung with odd little concoctions of popsicle sticks and macaroni that your child made in kindergarten. They should not be coordinated to match your couch.

I was in Michael’s the other day and noticed they had something called scented tinsel. Really? Why  - does your tree not smell the way it should? Does it need tree deodorant? If so, why not just go to the nearest gas station and buy a dozen of those little pine tree shaped thingies you hang from your rear-view mirror? Throw those on your tree, oh wait I get it, they wouldn’t go with the theme. This madness has to stop. 

Sometimes the best lesson you can learn is that things do not need to be perfect. Relax, let your tree smell like a tree. Don’t worry if all those homemade ornaments clash with your color scheme. Proudly display the cookies decorated by your kids. 

Last November I broke my wrist when I slipped on some ice. Well, there are quite of few things you cannot do when your arm is in a cast, not the least of which is bake cookies, write Christmas cards, or wrap presents. All that pressure to do those things that you think absolutely have to be done to make Christmas perfect, didn’t get done last year. And in the end, it didn’t really matter. I did what I could and didn’t get stressed about what I couldn’t do. It was pretty good actually. The girls were a great help. We came up with lots of ingenious ways of getting things done with me giving instructions and them trying to carry them out. 

So, here’s to an imperfect Christmas, homemade and filled with things you love, whether they go with your decor or not. And just for fun, here’s a list of some of the things I love: 

• the wreath of tiny handprints the girls made in nursery school when they were 3.
• the musical Christmas Angel Murray’s dad bought in Germany that sits in the middle of our Advent wreath each year
• the cardboard Santa and sleigh my father got for Christmas in 1936
• Oh, and my grandmother’s kuchen - which is perfect, every year.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Home

I'm home today, as I am most days since leaving the high pressure world of software development, and a realtor delivered a letter to our door asking if we'd been interested in selling our house.  Someone saw it and is interested in buying. Sorry whoever you are, while I understand your desire to live here (and I can't imagine anyone that wouldn't), we're not going anywhere. This is home, we love it here. And it's not just because we have a nice house in a pretty village. We are part of a community that is close knit and unique. The village is where you know all your neighbours. Where people band together if you need help, and even people you don't know waive as they pass you in their cars. It's where all the neighbourhood kids can go out and play and parents come out with snacks for the whole gang. It's home and we're staying.

Slipping off the Mommy Track

It's been a long time since my last post, the blog muse deserted me and there seemed to be nothing new to write about. Village life follows the same soothing yearly patterns, Christmas Craft shows, Spring Church dinners, Summer Fair, Fall Festivals. We all just flow along downstream from year to year.

But this year, suddenly things have changed. Not in the village, but in my life. After 20 years in the high tech industry, I was laid off. I'm probably in the minority, a lot of my colleagues have gone through this a number of times. But it was a first for me. Then, a couple of weeks later, to add injury to insult, as my husband said, I slipped and broke my wrist. Sometimes you have to be hit over the head before you get the message: slow down.

So, that's what I've been doing. Slowing down, being a stay at home mum. Baking bread, knitting, being there after school to make snacks and help with homework. And you know what? Some days it's enough, and other days I'd kill to get back into office clothes and go to work. Not the I have the option of staying home permanently, but I've realized that I wouldn't want to. This is also a bit of a revelation for my retirement planning. With two girls still in grade school, I won't be retiring any time soon, which I've discovered is just as well because I need the socialization and structure that being employed provides.

So, I'm looking for something new, but still struggling with the balance thing. I think every mother does.

Chicken Dinners and a Twenty-Six minute walk to Saint-Chapelle. Or four hours if you are directionally challenged,

Another installment....happy reading.

Dinner Sunday night. Paris has the world’s best chicken. Really, when you go to Paris, or anywhere else in France for that matter,you have to seek out  a trattior that has one of those chicken roasting cabinets sitting outside on the sidewalk. The kind where they roast not only chickens but have a pan of potatoes under the chickens so that the potatoes roast in the chicken fat. Bliss That and a salad, bottle of vin makes the perfect meal. It was a great way to round out a very soggy day in Paris. We spent all day walking, which more of less was the idea, but we’d headed out in the morning to go to Saint Chapelle. Google said it was  a 26 minute walk from the apartment, but Google hadn’t counted on how directionally challenged Kate and I are, so it took about 4 hours - mind you we window shopped, stopped for coffee and browsed in books stores, but still. Getting back was also a challenge, but by then the girl GPS kicked in - “oh I remember this shop, it has the cute dress in the window we must be headed in the right direction because we passed this on our way out this morning...”

One of our detours along the way was a stop at Shakespeare and Company, Paris’s iconic English language bookstore. What a place it is. An old crumbly hole in the wall crammed stem to stern with books of all kinds. Books line the rickety stairs, there are weird little alcoves filled with moldering cushions and mouldering patrons and papered with little mementoes (the alcoves, not the patrons, but you never know) of people, students mostly by the look of it who were passing though. There’s a piano on one floor and someone was up there playing it. We browsed though the shelves and I  would have like to have bought a couple of posters from the box labeled, amusing posters, 1 euro each, but would never have got it back to the apartment in tact in the driving rain.

38 Rue Vaneau

our Paris saga continues.....(new posts will appear when my broken wrist improves)

Saturday, finally here, grey rainy Paris, hooray. What is it that makes Paris in the rain look all misty and romantic, while Ottawa in the rain just looks cold and grey - oh wait, I think I answered my own question.

We are met outside our apartment by Joel, the rep from Paris Address, company I rented the oh so cute 5th floor apartment with the sleeping loft from. This little adventure  had started out as a solo trip to celebrate, although that’s not quite the right word, my turning 50. There’s something about this milestone birthday that makes you evaluate your life. Fifty is tricky because while you don’t feel old, or even think you look old (more about this later), there’s no denying it. You have more years behind you than you have in front of you and it makes you think. What I thought about mainly was, why wasn’t I doing the things I love to do? In many respects I have a blessed life, I have a comfortable lifestyle, a husband I love and two daughters that are the joy and wonder of my life, yet I feel most of the time as if I’m just going through the motions of getting through the week, only to run around like mad on the weekend doing all the chores I didn’t have time to do during the week because I’m working. So, when 50 hit, and I realized, that well not to put too fine a point on it, I had if I was lucky about 30 years left, I decided that I’d better start doing the things I wanted to do now. Those things were, travel, France mostly, I’m in love with it and always have been, drawing - I’m not very good at it, but again, that shouldn’t stop you from doing it. If you never try, you’ll never know if you can get better, and write. I started a blog a couple of years back that probably only has 2 readers, but that isn’t the point. Writing, drawing and even traveling to some place you love should be done for yourself. So here I am, in Paris, sketch pad, and laptop in hand and ready to go. 

But I digress, I do that a lot. It’s one of those things you catch yourself doing more and more as you get old. Where was I? Oh, yes, we’re outside the apartment, waiting for Joel. He arrives and leads us up the 5 flights of very narrow stairs to the top of the building and our apartment with sleeping loft and pull out sofa bed which till be home to Kate, who decided to accompany me on this little jaunt after I’d rented the flat. We heave our two large bags up the incredibly old and increasingly more narrow stairs (it’s like the builders had ADHD and lost interest at about the third floor and just laid the stairs out any old way so they could call it a day.

We finally make it to the top though, huffing a puffing, and.... the pull out sofa bed isn’t. Isn’t a bed that is, it’s a sofa, but with no pull out bed. Looks like Kate and I get to share a bed, (see early entry about matching jackets). But no, Joel is very good about it, they told us there was a pull out bed, they made a mistake, they’d find us another flat that would have two beds. That’s how a few hours later we end up at 38 Rue Vaneau.