Les Poissonchats

Or, at least wear some lipstick

My grandfather was very much into horses (and also beautiful women, but that’s another story), he was in the Swiss cavalry, and once had a grey who was so beautiful that General Guisan picked him for the defilée. Anyhow, please permit me my ramblings, the point I want to make is this: if you sit on a horse like, as we say in Swiss german, a bag of potatoes, you invariably will feel very soon very pained. Also you are likely to be thrown off at the whim of the animal, which, obviously, is very painful too, most of the times. And then also it may look grotesque. No it does look grotesque. This is why one is supposed to sit on a horse with a straight back and firmly seated on one’s buttocks, feeling that buttock bone through various layers of clothing and lard. Body tension, that’s it, as opposed to tense nerves in a bag of potatoes. 

Translates as: it all is much better if you pull yourself together, gracefully. Despite the weather sucks and Christmas carols suck and {insert culprit} sucks, going through the world like a bag of potatoes sucks definitely more. 

Translates again as: the quintessential French touch consists in never losing countenance. And if you, against all good advice should nevertheless lose it, at least wear some lipstick and make a sophisticated dramatic performance of it, see also door no 20 for inspiration.  

This is Les Poissonchat’s Wondrous Advent Calendar! Advent calendars are a huge tradition where I come from: you make little gifts for your loved ones every day until Christmas Day, fourandtwenty little surprises. The advent calendars come in beautifully old fashioned prints on cardboard, with extra glitter, and each day there’s a paper door waiting for you to pry open. Others are more elaborate, pretty baskets filled with twenty four numbered parcels, decorated with red velvet ribbons. The one I’m making for you this season is altogether a different one, and, quite obviously, it’s about beloved France, Christmas in France, and after all, what it takes to celebrate a proper French Christmas.