10+ Hours At The Dinner Table

After my adventure in Rotterdam, I was dead tired, of course (read the entry below--O Bus Driver, Where Art Thou?--for the full story), but I still had a Christmas Eve dinner at Clotilde's house, with her cousins. The great part is that Cheryl was also able to come along with me, so in the evening, Clotilde picked us up from my lycée and we headed off to dinner. If you aren't familiar with the French and how they celebrate different occassions, let me sum it up for you. They eat. The meals are huge and last for hours and hours...they definitely do not scarf down every course in 30 minutes and then watch TV for the rest of the night.

The dinner was really great. We started with little appetizers and a punch made out of Orangina and mirabelle eau-de-vie. The first course was foie gras (which I actually liked), bread, confitures of fig and onion and a small salad, served with a white wine. The second course consisted of salmon with a white cream inside, shrimp and a type of escargot (I can't remember the name, but it was a sea snail, whereas escargot are typically land snails), also with white wine. The third course was a whitefish dish with a yellow sauce and vegetables, served with red wine. This was followed by a cheese plate (of course) and dessert, two different Bûche de Noël.

Between courses, the children were visited by Père Noël, which was super adorable. He rang the doorbell and left the presents on the doorstep, and the kids were so excited to get their presents! Its been awhile since my cousins were this age, so it was so cute to see their reactions. Clotilde even gave Cheryl and I presents. I got a book full of French expressions, ones that don't translate (like the English equivalent of "It's raining cats and dogs"). She wrote me a note inside it using the expressions, so I have to find them in the book. It was super sweet and completely unneccessary of her. We are going to get her a box of the best macarons in Paris to thank her.

We finally went to sleep at 3am...which adds up to 42 hours with no sleep for me. I'm not sure how I didn't keel over into my plate. And when we woke up, we did it all over again on Christmas Day, with Clotilde's husband's family. The only difference was that we had scallops and rice instead of the whitefish. Cheryl and I were so stuffed that when we returned to Lunéville, we went on a walk to look at the chateau's decorations/walk off some of the food we ate. We realized that in the 24 hours we spent at Clotilde's house, 10+ were spent at the dinner table...but we're definitely not complaining.