Christmas is all around you

Text and photography: Vanessa Frey

Travellive 12/2010 - Illuminations are everywhere in town: hung on the trees, floating on the lakes, and on all the windows. People are just about to rush in the stores and buy “unexpected” gifts to their family just like they are supposed to. Christmas!

“All I want for Christmas”

                        

As much as Christmas is spreading to Vietnam, we are still far from what is happening in the West at this time of the year. Christmas is a Christian holiday. A real holy day. You do not need Facebook to send you a reminder saying “you have one friend with birthday this week”. Why? BecaChristmas day is one of the most celebrated holidays in the world.

When December comes, as a Westerner kid, your family will ask what you want for Christmas. Among all these toys in the catalogue - calling you by your first name in a sweet and imaginary voice, looking so fun or smart or classy - you have to choose one. And it is so difficult, that you will eventually try to negotiate with your parents, telling them how well you behaved this year - probably just the past few days - and how much you are craving for these toys. “Santa is way too old to carry more than one gift per child”. That’s what parents always say.

                       

Of course, the way you decorate your Christmas tree is crucial. From houses to streets, gardens to parks, they are decorated colourfully with tons of gifts sprawled under. Kids shout happily when opening their gifts in the next morning.

Each year in January every women’s magazine will publish an article on “How to lose the Christmas weight”. Indeed all the things that you refrain from eating the rest of the year are permitted: the mashed potato with crème fraîche, the blood sausage, the foie gras, the chestnut-stuffed turkey, and the irresistible Christmas cookies (half-butter, half-sugar). After dining, the most fervent ones will take part to the midnightmass at the church:  singing Christian carols, praying for their family, listening to the sermon…

“Christmas is all around you”

                      

What is really amazing about Christmas is the atmosphere in the streets. I will highly recommend you to visit Paris in December. Not only to shop at Les Galeries Lafayette (huge French shopping mall) - although its elaborate decorated windows are worth seeing – but above all to stroll around the city. During your walk, you will feel the impatience of the children, the enthusiasm of the adults; you will catch the tantalizing smell coming from bakeries offering Christmas desserts; you will see decorations everywhere even through the window of people’s apartments; you will stop and buy some grilled chestnuts to a trolley man; and if you are really lucky some snow flakes will start to fall down, touching the top of your nose, making you feel happy, maybe a bit silly, but glad to be there anyway.

   

“Although it’s been said many times many ways a very merry Christmas to you”.