Our Blog - Christmas 2019

It is that time of the year again, and we spent this morning getting the Christmas cards in the mail. It isn't as easy as it was in the US. First, we normally buy our Christmas cards during the year and have them shipped to Susan's mom's house. You can sometimes find Christmas cards here, but the French traditionally do not send Christmas cards, they send New Year's cards. So we buy them in advance and pick them up each year when we are in the US visiting family. Then we sign them (always by hand) and print out the address labels. We have been doing a Christmas letter in them for the past few years and we did our letter this year and went to our local copy-place to get the copies printed. Tom did a great job folding and stuffing all of the cards. Then the stamps ... we took them over to the post office and had to weigh them as we had various different weights ... 4 different types of cards, some with letter, some without, some to the US, some to France. Then instead of just having generic printed ones, we decided it would be better to try to find some nice ones. Well ... really should have gone with the generic ones because we ended up buying an entire stack of stamps ... some that were 2 per page, others 6 per page. And the page included lots of other non-stamp stuff that we had to remove to actually put the stamps on the envelopes. 6 hours later .... we dropped them in the postal box!

The Christmas Market in Toulouse is in full-swing now, and we've been making our way to each food chalet for lunch throughout the week. Many of the streets in centre ville have lights and decorations up, and there is a huge decorated Christmas tree in the new Ramblas-type pedestrian area at Jean Jaurès. We walked through Place Wilson on Friday and the tree in the middle of the park area there was decorated with these large lit ornaments, and the tree at Place Jeanne d'Arc has these light snow flakes all over the tree. This is the one time of the year that walking around after dark is better than during the day. Soon, we will also make our way over to the Christmas Market in Cologne, Germany for a couple of days (another blog will be coming for that).

Then we spent a little time and put up some Christmas decorations. Last year, we basically did nothing, as we were moving out of one apartment and into another. This year, we limited our decorations due to Lucy ... we didn't want to have anything on the floor that she could chew on, and attempted to limit our glass decorations that could get broken.

Our tree ... the first Christmas we were in Toulouse, we got a real Christmas tree and had it all decorated. But we have a few too many heavy decorations and the real tree branches weren't strong enough and a few of them came off and broke. So we decided that the next tree we bought would be a really nice artificial tree. However, with Lucy, we decided to go with a smaller tree this year that we could put on a small table. We also limited the decorations to small, light-weight ones that wouldn't break. So even the small glass ornaments remained in the box this year. We don't think we will keep the tree for next year (hopefully we will go back to a nice large tree), but this was a nice way to ease Lucy into having a Christmas tree. Our teddy bear top also didn't make it as it was too heavy for the tree, but we have our Christmas tree skirt out!

We also put out our nativity scene. Many people may remember seeing this before, but if not, this is a set that my family made we I was young and we had out at my parents house for years. When I moved away from home, I was able to bring this with me and I've been using it almost every year since. This year, it is on a table in our foyer, so that it is up off the floor. We also don't really trust Lucy to not bump into the table while she is playing, so we used Velcro to lightly attach all of the pieces (other than the Angel) to the wooden manger. We had to limit some of the pieces, so we only have 1 camel instead of 3, but all of the important pieces are there. Perhaps before next year, we will get a custom table made (we have a wood craftsman here in Toulouse that created a custom table for our balcony) for the foyer that is longer than this one, but still not all that wide. We could find other tables we liked for the foyer but the ones that were longer than this one were also quite a bit wider, and we didn't really need additional width.

We also did some twinkly lights on our balcony and some Christmas stickers on the windows. We've collected several Christmas candles from around the world and get those lit during the evenings at home. Not too bad for the first year in this new apartment. Our goal is to get more out next year when Lucy is older and get a large gorgeous tree with all of our decorations.

Lucy continues to grow and change. We recently bought a larger crate for her and she has settled into that one quite nicely. It is a collapsible fabric crate that we can fold down and take in the car with us when we travel with her. We also brought her bed back out (she didn't really like it the first time) and she likes taking her naps in it during the day. I don't quite understand how sleeping like this could be comfortable! She also now likes getting up on the couch and napping there. We only let her up when we are also on the couch, since we don't want her jumping down (not good for a growing puppy back). We continue to take her to group puppy class on Saturdays and puppy recess on Sundays, along with taking her out of town to an area where we can let her explore without being on the leash without any risk of her getting into too much trouble. We tried a new area this week but it has one side that is open and has a hill that goes down into a small river. She may not run down there, but then again, she may decide to go chase the ducks on the water and that would not be a good thing!