Bordeaux and Palmiers

I remember, when I was about fourteen or fifteen, Christmas stopped being exciting. I know that it happens to most people, but it absolutely devastated me. When I was younger, buying Christmas presents was my absolute favorite activity: I wasn’t excited about what I would receive on Christmas morning… I actually always sort of found opening my presents in front of everyone to be a bit embarrassing. But I adored watching the faces of my family as they opened the gifts that I had spent so much time picking out.

As I got older, I had less and less time to devote to picking out the best gift. I still loved doing it, but instead of shopping all of November and December, sometimes coming home with nothing at all, just to make sure I had the best gift possible for everyone, a lot of my shopping was done in a rush between the 21st and the 24th, a crazy whirl of buying and wrapping everything at once.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the Christmas spirit came back to me one year when I was utterly depressed: right before Christmas when I was eighteen years old, I had found out that I had not been accepted to my first choice school: Columbia, my father’s alma mater. As a Christmas gift, my mother had planned a trip for me and my father to Austria… a sort of celebratory/commiseratory trip that would do us some good no matter what the news was.

Vienna was gorgeous, but it was in Saltzburg that I fell in love… not only with Austria, but with Christmas again. If you can be anywhere on Christmas, be in Austria. The Christmas markets there put even the most depressed and angry eighteen year old back in the Christmas spirit.

I haven’t been back to Austria since. I’ve always promised myself  I would go back for Christmas, but somehow I’ve never made it there. However, I did find something in Paris this week that’s nearly as good: the Christmas market on the Champs-Elysées.

Of course, it’s different: there’s no snow, and it’s so commercialized that even bakery chain Paul has a stand. But the smell of traditional French gingerbread is in the air, and it definitely got me in the mood for the Christmas season. So much that I bought this Christmas tea from Strasbourg. There were four different kinds from four different cities specially for Christmas, as well as an assortment of other loose leaf teas and infusions, all placed in bowls so you could smell and inspect before making your purchase.

Mine smells of Christmas spices, and when I make it, my whole apartment smells like Christmas.

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