No Champagne for Me, Please. Or Smoked Salmon. Or Cheese. . .

Being pregnant around the holidays in France really makes you appreciate how vegans must feel during the rest of the year. Not only do certain sights and smells (fresh fish and pungent wheels of cheese at the morning market) make you go green around the gills, but whatever tempts your palate turns out to be hiding a blacklisted ingredient (a French dessert without eggs or butter is about as likely as rum-free punch at a Christmas party). So you get used to passing on pink platters of smoked salmon on tiny toasts and doilied trays of canopés slathered with foie gras mousse. Of course, while vegans can quell their growling stomachs with raw veggies (déconseillés for femmes enceintes due to toxoplasmosis risk) and sparkling trays of teetering champagne flutes, pregnant women's safest bet at Christmastime seems to be baguette and filtered water.
No wonder why Mary's a saint.

Production drawing of Sebastian. [Online image] 1989.

"Magique Pour Tous"

Holiday magic may be for the kids, but it's we adults who need it most. And the French seem quite all right with indulging us.

They might not be into hanging up stockings over the fireplace, but they let us sprinkle santons of miniature lambs and pumpkin-carrying ladies on top of our grown-up meubles. And though making gingerbread houses isn't very big here, it's totally acceptable to spend an evening trying to turn a chocolate cake into a snow-covered log.

Giant Santas and reindeer might be scarce in the City of Lights, but parents will stop to look at winter scenes of dancing princesses and twitching rabbits in store windows or at the glittering strands of lights that guide shoppers to rues commerçantes like stars.

Natalie Wood and Maureen O'Hara as Susan and Doris Walker. [Online image] 1947.