Or, myrrh et encens

Mes nounours, we are approaching Christmas. C’est-à-dire: the gold standard of kitsch, against which lesser kitschy holidays (and let’s face it, they’re all kitschy) must be unfavorably measured.

I love it. 

Before and after the mercifully brief spell of Catholic fervor that invaded me in my teens, Christmas had, and has, no taint of spiritual significance. This is a time to disregard good taste and return to the blithe freedom from self-restraint we had at five, when we insisted on wearing Superman capes and tiaras and sparkly shoes to the grocery store. One need deny oneself nothing, from the mawkish to the outlandish to the cloying.

Accordingly, my childhood love for Christmas was founded on my inexhaustible capacity for the saccharine. 

I mean that literally as well as figuratively. Even among Americans, who crave sweeter sweets and more of them than most of the world’s population, my current capacity for all things sucré rivals the average twelve-year-old’s—as those of you who have seen me eat an ice cream sundae can attest. Imagine, then, dear readers, how hungrily I ate up as a child every syrupy morsel of the American Holiday Season™: those silly polar bear ads, the stop-motion animation atrocities and the holiday music on 99.9 FM that started just after Thanksgiving. And—of course!—the sweets, especially the endless cookies and fudge and hot chocolate we made at home. I was mad, mad for it all.

Of course, even my starry eyes eventually opened, and even the girl who once sucked happily on sugar cubes must someday close the lid of that C&H box. 

But when Amy suggested we go to a Christmas market, that little Princess Superman within me awoke with a cry of joy. A Christmas market! I imagined it as the Platonic ideal of Christmas: quaint kitsch, carols, traditional food and hot drinks, delicate lights and ornaments, pines and pitched rooftops frosted with snow like unblemished, delicate cakes. In short, the stuff of European Christmases promised to me by endless carols and storybooks. 

Thus, on Saturday, we found ourselves shuttling along on a TGV toward Strasbourg, chattering in broken, enthusiastic French, in hopes of discovering our fairytale Christmas.

Fair warning: this is a long post. Cuddle up with a cup of something warm and stay a while.

Strasbourg is in Alsace, near the German border. Its Marché de Noël, the oldest in France, dates back to the 16th century. For those seeking Old World Christmas charm, this is it: a bastion of European Christmas attractions, boasting elaborate light displays, musical performances, ice sculptures, carriage rides, booths with Christmas wares, and—naturally—riches upon riches of traditional food.

Upon our arrival, we stopped in the station's tourism office to pick up a few maps, and then we were out the door--greeted immediately by our first destination for Christmas marketing.

The markedly Christmasy view from the doors of the SNCF station.

Alongside jars of confiture and puffy bonhommes de noël (the destination for little baked men, gingerbread and otherwise), the good folks of Strasbourg had already begun to ladle out cups of the mulled spiced wine that the Germans call glühwein and the French vin chaud. The woman pictured below offered us a sample, asking us to choose between red and white.

In case you were wondering, the German word for drinking before noon is Frühschoppen.

The bakery booth across from it featured the small cookies I have come to think of as a part of the holidays. In fact, an unexpected and gratifying part of my day was unraveling the thread of my German maternal great-great-grandmother's influence on my conception of Christmas.

Ever since I can remember, my mother has kept a red box of index cards with handwritten recipes in laminate slipcovers. She's indifferent about cooking, so most of the recipes are for baking: quickbreads, cakes, fudge, bars. But the largest section is the cookies. During my childhood, we'd riffle through them, selecting five or six recipes to prepare and freeze. On December weekends, we'd make two, three, four kinds at once. Most were small, the size of a chestnut. And for each holiday event, we'd take the tupperware containers out of the freezer and select a few of each to arrange on a plate. On average, there might be two kinds of fudge, three small cookies, and the pièce de résistance: our family's glazed sugar cookies.

Begun so long ago no one can remember, the tradition among the women on my mother's side of the family is to gather and make hundreds of the cookies. The dough, the recipe for which is top-secret, is made by the hostess the night before and chilled. Always a double-batch at least, although even a single batch will make enough cookies to provide for a reasonably sized elementary school. On the day itself, when--depending on the year--four to eight women gather for the event, one or two women are on their feet, rolling, cutting and baking the cookies, one is in charge of frosting replenishment and dyeing (a part-time job), and the rest decorate. Everyone contributes her cookie cutters and sprinkles, an industrial roll each of paper towels and wax paper is employed, and the hostess's dining room table—lined entirely with parchment—serves as a drying rack. They drink gallons of coffee with milk and talk about everything, sitting around a table that, with its mismatched bowls of varicolored frosting and sprinkle shakers in constant movement, resembles a painter's studio.

During most of my childhood, the matriarch of the table was my great grandmother, who died when I was twelve (my aforementioned great-great-grandmother died when I was six, at the age of 106). I was—and remain—the youngest.

I recreated Cookie Day every year with my various roommates while living in the Bay, but here, where the kitchens and ovens are just too small, I must content myself with gazing at the luscious baked goods of Alsace. Of which, regretfully, I took no pictures. Perhaps it was amnesia brought on by a keen wave of nostalgia. Forgive me.

I did, however, take pictures of other foods. Here is one of many quaint, kitschy train-shaped carts where vendors roast and sell hot roasted chestnuts. I am not used to them, and the smell is new and romantic to me. Something to register, perhaps, for nostalgia in future years.

The ubiquitous hot roasted chestnuts.

But European Christmas certainly has its departures from my childhood experience. Looking around at the garden of Sapins de Noël displayed for sale, I was struck by the difference in size from their groomed, overgrown American cousins that must be lashed to the roofs of cars. This is the biggest one I could find. For reference, I'm 5'6" (167 cm for my non-US readers). In fact, some of these sapins reminded me irresistibly of the scraggly little tree from A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Hidden layers within the matryoshka pictured include, but are not limited to, a tank top, three long sleeved shirts, a sweater, thick tights, and fuzzy calf-length Tinkerbell night socks. Amy, by the end of the day, wore two pairs of socks over her leggings and tights, beneath her not unsubstantial boots.

A few paces away, to our delight, near the foot of the famous gargantuan Christmas tree (I'll show you later--promise), were two ice sculptors. Amy and I watched as they performed their delicate work, and admired the finished pieces. 

Armed with her map, Amy led the way: I blithely followed her to our first warren of Christmas market booths.

The storefronts dripped with garlands, glass, lights. Tourists like us packed the modest-sized streets leading to the main markets. I wondered, briefly, what the city is like in the off season, whether the throngs of enchanted tourists invigorate their own festival spirits, or--more likely, I suspect--whether they have grown to dread Christmas and the endless procession of giddy people it attracts to their town.

But I came to be a child, and children don't wonder for long about the feelings of others. I plunged back into the desire to take pictures. It quelled the pressing desire of my id to bite absolutely everything pretty.

Fortunately, there are plenty of things to bite at a Christmas market. Once we arrived at the booths, our very first stop was one of the many food vendors along the first row, where Amy and I each bought a baguette slathered with cream sauce and sprinkled with lardons (thick bacon cut into bits the size of lozenges), caramelized onion and cheese. Amy sipped on hot orange juice infused with honey, and I on a cup of vin chaud--each our first of several for the day--and we found a niche to stand and nibble.

The vin chaud is ladled out from the vats, as pictured on the left.

Vendors sold trinkets: the kind of thing I'd never own, much less buy, but I love looking at. They remind me of the ones that covered the side tables and coffee tables and kitchen counters of our house near Christmas when I was a child. Despite the fact that my parents' taste is very minimalist, streamlined, with little use for trinkets, they made an exception for Christmas decorations. My mother, who secretly has a weakness for what my father grinchily calls "Christmas crap," receives these little things from the women in her family; some date back to her childhood, or even earlier. I recognized a family resemblance to these old pieces of nostalgia in some of the plates and decorations.

This man was (understandably) not pleased to have a stranger snapping a picture of him and his tiny, adorable Christmas village houses.

The food booths were equally compelling. I watched, entranced, as a man pried rings of candied pineapple from their neighbors with a pair of tongs. The syrup dripped sinuously from each piece as he lifted it from its case and placed it in a plastic container. I ogled the translucent, perfect spheres of the varicolored candy fruits in the surrounding bins.

Gingerbread, molded and elaborately decorated in the forms of angels and stars, flanked rows of smaller cookies and loaves of pain d'epices. And neither Amy nor I could resist a chocolatier selling slabs of chocolate in twenty varieties, broken upon order into squares as wide as my palm and then, after the woman serving us ascertained that we wanted them coupés, broke them with metal tongs into quarters before slipping them into our bags and placing it on the scale.

After buying decadent, heavy sachets of cookies and chocolate and, realizing how long we would have to carry any purchases, making shopping lists for the end of the day--stollen, pain d'epices, a sachet of spices for home-brewed vin chaud--we flitted to the next market (full of gourmet foods), and then the next.

This one was in front of the cathedral.

And oh--what a cathedral.

As seen through the garlands and wreaths.

That is no trick of your eyes, mes darlings. That cathedral is Sedona-cliff-red.

As Amy ducked into a tourist shop to buy a magnet for her mother's collection (family travel tradition), I observed, hanging back on the street, the threads of tourists perusing the booths at the foot of the cathedral. A little jazz band in Santa costumes performed at the corner where this street met the cathedral square.

The interior of the cathedral was lovely, glorious, of course, with stunning vitraux, but Amy and I didn't stay for long: an off-key children's choir was performing strange holiday selections, including that old chestnut, Feliz Navidad, and--bizarrely--an insipid Christmas song set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

But when we emerged: oh my.

It was around four in the afternoon, and while the sun was still out, it was low enough to cue the lights. They switched on as we watched, string after string, booth after booth. And suddenly, the daylight was studded with stars.

As we rounded the corner, we spotted this beauty: a carousel that, upon further inspection, proved to be rather literarily themed: on the seventeenth century fables of Jean de la Fontaine, with each illuminated panel of the rounding board illustrating a fable. 

Only in France.

The wolf and the lamb. Among the others was Le Rat de la Ville et Le Rat du Champs (the city mouse and the country mouse). 

Strasbourg is a beautiful city. As we walked to the next market, bitten with the sudden cold that had begun to settle alongside the sun, I admired the steep, snow-painted roofs of the buildings flanking the river. I thought of the snow in Paris and how magical it had felt. Snow makes a statement there, like hats do on certain people. In Strasbourg, it just belongs, like a worn-in fedora on an old man. It's old, settled, traditional.

Like its Christmas.

After more marketing and window shopping, overcome with cold, Amy and I ducked into a bustling, warm café for a recovery chocolat chaud for her, a plain café for me (I was queasy from stuffing myself with chocolate, cookies and vin chaud). Then, reluctantly, we wrapped ourselves tightly back up in our neutrals and braced ourselves for the cold that would almost surely be stronger now that the early winter darkness had descended.

By now, the sun had nearly vanished: the burner was off, and the final heat and glow faded fast from the sky. Crossing the river again was a religious experience.

At night, the city transforms. The lights change everything.

The garlands of lights that up to the cathedral now eclipse it in brilliance, like the angels whose collective nimbus eclipses the pastoral scenery in Christmas storybook illustrations.

The tree in the square was now a cathedral in itself: a towering illuminated presence. With its endless pinprick lights, it reminded me of driving out to Bartlett Lake at three in the morning during my first year of college and standing on the dock, looking at the water and the sky. The stars, no longer drowned by the lights of the city, multiplied to dense, almost impossible numbers.

Just to give you an idea of the scale, observe the size of the people underneath it. 

The small street we had taken to the first market, where we now returned to complete our planned purchases, now shone brighter than in daylight.

And the signs beckoning visitors to the rows of booths provided much better publicity.

The Germans are said to have invented the glass ornament--that is, the kind blown into opaque, brilliantly colored shapes. And while they're eye-catching by day, they're entrancing by night. Clearly, they were designed to reflect the lights of the tree in which they nest. But I enjoy seeing them like this: nestled in their trays, in rows and columns, like jewels in adjacent bezels. 

Even the most jaded among you can't deny, at least for a moment, that kitsch has its beauty.

Our last stop on the way back to the SNCF station was at our very first clutch of Christmas market booths. In the end, I couldn't live without a puffy, adorable, anthropomorphic reminder of the fact that Christmas, in the end, is a holiday for children.

All of us.

European Christmas is not untainted with the same menaces that have driven Americans to a cynicism that renders ambivalent our feverish, childish adoration. But here, there is--however cliché it sounds--a simpler and more honest approach. What they sell is ephemeral, seasonal: food and trinkets. It's taken for granted that the Christmas market is not something to get done--it's something to do, with family and friends; something to linger over; something to remember.

In the pit of the long, cold, dark season, it gives light.