Noel

Way back in September 2008 my future husband and I had a rather long and somewhat talkative lunch. Somewhere in between a couple of lattes and some paninis we decided to go away for Christmas that year. There was really only one place that both of us wanted to go - Paris, the City of Light and the location for some of our most happy memories from the past two years. So we decided to go. We returned to our computers and tried to ease our way back into working by reading the BBC News... only to find that the channel tunnel had just caught fire and the way to Paris looked like it might be blocked for quite some time. Ever the optimists, we booked the cheap Eurostar tickets anyway. Luckily the fire didn't cause too much disruption and so it came to pass that on Christmas morning we woke up in a rather classy apartment on Rue Vaneau in the 7th Arrondissement. It had a fireplace, a beautiful stone floor and (in the second en-suite bedroom) my mother, a Parisian virgin (remarkable after sixty-five years and one failed marriage, I know, but there you are).

Truthfully I have found the meaning of Christmas to be hard to grasp in recent years. When I was a child it was easy to pin down - it meant presents and staying at my grandparents' house. Growing older I found it to be an occasion marked by overindulgence in food and drink. When I first moved in with my boyfriend it became an opportunity to show off, with me attempting to be the perfect domestic goddess. I remember being so excited about inviting people over to our house. And then I remember discovering, over the course of the following few weeks that everybody else had actually had a crap time while I, in my Nigella Lawson style whirlwind, had been completely oblivious to the fact. Each passing yuletide since then has seen my bitter resentment grow and though I am ashamed to admit it, Christmas has become a time of duty and obligation, endured or at best tolerated.

As a household we had become stuck in a Christmas rut, with the dark sense of foreboding commencing sometime near the end of summer and persisting until the New Year has been rung in. We needed to do something different and Paris provided a breath of fresh air. The presence of mother opened the door to full days spent doing unashamedly touristy things, like a Seine river cruise, as opposed to hours of eating and vegetating. There was not a turkey, Queen's speech or Doctor Who Special in sight. The cobwebs were well and truly blown off the tinsel.

Paris doesn't just grind to a halt in the way that provincial England does on Christmas Day. Shops open in the morning to enable people to buy fresh food, just like any other day. The first thing we did on Christmas morning was visit the bakery to buy bread and an enormous, baroquely decorated, very expensive yule log. Traditional local festive fare, apparently, and very nice it was too. Actually it pretty much single handedly sustained my mother, who didn't adapt well to the rest of the continental cuisine, for the rest of our visit. We had a long conversation in French about the weather with the lady in the bakery. It was strangely satisfying. Walking along Rue Cler, a street famous for its small, exclusive food shops, later on in the morning we were confronted with an array of fresh oysters, meat, vegetables and the attendant throng of Parisians eager to buy them. The Eiffel Tower wasn't shut for the holidays either, so we took a trip to the top for what must have been the best view I've ever experienced on Christmas Day. It certainly beat the sight of mother asleep in a chair or the fiance trying on his Christmas jumpers.

The fact that the Metro was running made popping out in the evening simple. There didn't even seem to be any sort of reduced service on Christmas Day; the only difference was that there were less people traveling and it was easier than usual to get a seat. We rounded off our Christmas by attending a free concert of piano music and seasonal readings at St. Sulpice church. Curiously, we found ourselves sitting close to some Americans who had been drawn to the church because of its connection to the "Da Vinci Code". I have no idea what this was all about, never having read the book myself, but there was a kind of comfort in knowing that somebody else understood as little of the readings as we did. Delivered in sonorous, guttural French by a large man with an equally large beard, the texts were certainly atmospheric even if they were also incomprehensible.

Maybe Christmas will always be incomprehensible to me, too. This year it meant five days of lunchtime wine and being in the heart of a city that I love, sharing it with people that I love. It meant doing rather than dozing. It was different. It was good. So maybe this year it will be good if it turns out to be something different again. If Christmas retains that elusive quality by continually keeping me guessing and constantly reinventing itself (or more accurately being reinvented by me and those I spend it with) then I might perhaps come around to liking it again.