Weeks 42 and 43 - Our first Christmas abroad

Last weekend was quiet because K had caught a cold/the flu/the plague. Regardless of what it was exactly, he was down for the count so we weren't able to go skiing/snowboarding as originally planned. We did make it to the library though, and K finally broke down and got a French-translation of his favorite science fiction author's novel. Despite the decent-sized English book selection at the Neuchâtel library, it has a relatively low percentage of sci-fi in English. His French vocabulary is good enough at this point that he can muscle his way through these books in French, though it helps immensely that he's already read them in English.

Also last weekend, we put up our small, fake Christmas tree that we've had for years and decorated it with Christmas lights we bought at the local home improvement store. The lights are pretty fancy; they have 8 different settings of flash/blink/twinkle that we can cycle through.

We also started our annual tradition of watching Christmas movies: Wish for Wings that Work, Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (with Burl Ives),...

As can be imagined, work was relatively calm this past week. M brought in a bûche de noël (yule log) that she had made according to a recipe her French teacher had given her. It looked ok and tasted pretty good. We worked up through December 23 and went to the shops that evening to get groceries for Christmas dinner. The shops were open really late on Thursday; most were open until 9:30 to allow shoppers to get last-minute gifts.

Since Thanksgiving we've had a few cycles of snow (which sticks around for several days) followed by rain (that melts away most of the remaining snow), even though the temperature has remained low the entire time. Up-through Christmas Eve Eve, we were in a "no snow" period, but starting Christmas Eve morning, snow started coming down.

Also on Christmas Eve morning, M woke up with at least a smidge of what K had had. (She had a pretty bad sore throat and some muscle aches, but didn't seem to be quite as sick as K had been. Though as a friend has pointed out it may have been that K had a case of the man flu.) Even so, we walked into town in the falling snow to pick up an 11th hour package from the post office and also stopped by the grocery store for last-minute provisions. After spotting a pack of tortillas in the store, M was jonesing for tex-mex/mexican food, so we had black bean soft tacos for dinner. With the 5CHF 8-pack of flour tortillas as a safety net, M tried making a recipe for Texan flour tortillas from a foodie blog. To her surprise, they were pretty easy to make (although there was a small time investment waiting for the dough to rest) and were quite delicious. There will definitely be more soft tacos in the Bolton menu from now on. While we chowed down on our tacos, we watched "It's a Wonderful Life".

The presents under the tree Christmas morning indicate that Santa was able to transfer the Boltons' information from his database to Père Noël's without a hitch. K and M both got presents in their stockings and a couple presents under the tree. Major and Minor also received some presents. Christmas Day was spent lazing about, visiting with family over Skype and watching more Christmas specials online (Muppet Family Christmas, Garfield Christmas, Alf Christmas, etc).

On Boxing Day (Sunday after Christmas) we walked through one of the local "neighborhoods" to look at the snow and Christmas decorations. The sun was out, but even fully bundled up (hats, winter coats, gloves), it felt brutally cold. While we passed numerous Swiss dressed appropriately (i.e. bundled like Ralphie's little brother in Christmas Story), we also saw numerous folk more lightly dressed, with many bare-heads. Now, as everyone in the States knows, one loses 99.9+% of their body-heat through their melon, so this was simply shocking to see. The blood here must truly be thicker.

Lessons learned:

1) The average Swiss Christmas tree is no bigger than our fake 3 feet tree we bought from General Dollar. They cost about as much as a five or 6 foot tree in the states but look like they're straight out of the Charlie Brown Christmas special. It is possible to get a 6 foot tree, but there were not many of them and they cost a pretty penny/centime. I think the Christmas tree farm is a foreign concept to them.

2) Joking about the plague in Europe doesn't work quite as well as in the US. "Is K sick?" "Yeah, he's got the plague." "What! K has la peste?!?!?" I suppose the Black Death still seems a little too real to Europeans for them to understand hyperbole.