Christmas in France

Christmas Eve we were treated to a wonderful tradition of "Les Treize desserts " (13 desserts) by the Bruzzone family. The thirteen desserts are used in celebrating Christmas region of Provence. They represent Jesus and His apostles. The desserts always number thirteen but the exact items vary by local or familial tradition. The food traditionally is set out Christmas Eve and remains on the table three days until December 27th.

As you can see there was plenty, and I'm not sure that we got to sample all thirteen but we did our best. There were raisins, dates, and other assorted dried fruits, nuts, fresh tangerines and some that were cooked for hours in sugar whole that was by far the sweetest thing I've ever eaten in my life! There was pastries, pompes a l'huile and on and on!

This is obviously before we started eating!

Here we are before the gluttony heading to the living nativity at the Frejus Cathedral. Unfortunately we got there late, so we were standing in the back but it was beautiful...we stayed long enough to see a baby lamb go in and sit on "Joseph's" lap. There was also a baby "Jesus" sitting on "Mary's" lap and he was a really good baby, he never made a sound, never cried and barely wiggled.

Then on Christmas morning Abigail played Santa and handed out all the gifts, sometimes as you see taking more at one time than she should. She was so excited this year and actually more about watching our reactions to the gifts she'd gotten us and not necessarily about receiving gifts! She is getting to be such a big girl!

Here we are proudly displaying our new Russian hats that Nicholas brought us. Mine is called a Mongolka and is Silver Fox and Abigail's is as warm as it is cute! We love them!

The rest of the day was spent in our PJ's enjoying the calm of the day. The next day we were off on our whirlwind adventure!