it's beginning to look a lot like christmas...

The "illuminations" around town have finally been turned on, and I have to say they do know how to do Christmas around here. But maybe that's because what I'm comparing to is the huge, awful hand-me-down lights along the St. Clair River every year. (sorry, but they're ugly!) So far, I've found Christmas here to be more traditional, which is to say that it's not as commercial and removed from the "true meaning," so to speak, as home. Don't get me wrong, I like presents, but I can see that here the presents are part of the celebration instead of being the celebration, and I have to say I rather like it.

This weekend was full of beginning of Christmas fun. Early Saturday morning I left for Nancy via Paris. Before I left I realized I had a two-hour gap in Paris, and after studying the map a bit I realized I had just enough time to make another of my Christmas wishes come true-I went to see the animated windows at Printemps!!! A few weeks ago, I was watching the news and they showed the new window decorations at Printemps, a big department store in Paris. Now I've never spent Christmas in a big city, and especially not a European city, so these windows were something I had always imagined but never seen. Basically, some professional comes in and creates moving window displays-kind of like a looping puppet show. This year the theme in Britain, and so the windows all have something to do with that, and all the little guys in the animations are made out of socks (I'm not sure why). It's just one of those things that, for me, makes Christmas seem a bit more magical and fairy-tale like, and there were crowds of people there watching them, so being part of it all really felt kind of cool.

After spending some time in the stores, I got on a train for Nancy. Steph met me at the train station and after a few hours at her place, we headed downtown to the St. Nicholas fireworks with some of her roommates. Because Nancy is in Northeastern France, in a region known as Lorraine, and so close to Germany, they celebrate Christmas in some of the more traditional Germanic ways, which includes celebrating St. Nicholas Day. The fireworks in Nancy were set up in Place Stanislas, a square in the middle of town surrounded by stately buildings that house the town hall and a disco, among other things. The fireworks were set up over one of the buildings, and laser lights illustrating the story of St. Nicholas were projected onto others. Overall, we decided that French fireworks are a bit more elegant than American ones, considering most American fireworks I've seen involved shooting a bunch of random stuff off in no specific order. These fireworks were mostly white and floaty, and were timed to go along with the story and the music of the whole thing. At one point, St. Nicholas appeared above the crowd, except because of the size of the building they had to put him in a crane, covered with fabric to reveal it's true crane-ness, of course. This amused me and frightened me all at the same time. After the fireworks we headed to a club in town where we danced until closing time at 2 a.m. Needless to say, the next morning we weren't moving very quickly.

We made it back downtown in time for the St. Nicholas parade, Because our position wasn't great and it looked like a pretty typical parade, though, Steph gave into my desire to wander through the Christmas market. It actually looked quite a lot like the market I went to in Caen-little wooden huts filled with people selling scarves, jewelry, Christmas goods and food. Since I wasn't really shopping for Christmas presents, I wasn't completely into it, but I did have an absolutely delicious creme de marron beignet (chestnut creme doughnut), contemplating the entire time how I could make my own with the chestnut jam Evan left me. After we made it back just in time to watch St. Nicholas pass, we started on our way to the creperie where we were meeting Steph's roommate Ailsa for her birthday dinner. We had a fantastic meal (with a dinner and dessert crepe, of course) and headed back just in time to get caught in the rain. Nothing a little tea and an American film couldn't remedy though.

Monday it was back to Carentan, and now it's just another week of teaching and whatnot. On my way to school this morning I caught a glimpse of one of my students through the window, and he got this huge grin on his face and gave me a huge wave hello. So cute.

I'm about to post some new pictures on my site, so check there soon!