Happy New Year from French Country

A Happy New Year to all visitors to the French Country website. Hopefully many of you find the bits and pieces of news I write interesting, giving you a flavour of life here in the south of France. Perhaps the articles may even entice some of you to sample the life for yourself and spend a beautiful holiday in our region.

For us this has been a wonderful festive season. I last wrote about the pre-Christmas shopping trip we made to Montpellier, getting the Christmas feeling as we spent time in Les Hivernales - the Christmas Market. Well, the feeling continued as we spent a beautiful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For Christmas Eve we went to Béziers, to la cathédrale Saint-Nazair, shown below.

This is a beautiful cathedral with a history stretching back to the 13th century. The original cathedral, built on the site of an ancient Roman temple, was completely destroyed during the Cathars crusade in 1209. The reconstruction of the current cathedral started around 1250, and over the centuries further additions have been made to the original building.

The Christmas service in the cathedral is always special. This year, as before, the choir - les Petits Chanteurs de la Trinité, made the service even more so. It was wonderful to listen to the choir as they sang some very popular French seasonal songs.

Les Petits Chanteurs de la Trinité in the cathedral in Béziers

For Christmas Day we had decided to forgo the many invitations we had received, and resisted the special Christmas Day menus offered by most of the local restaurants. We had already agreed that after such a busy and hectic year we wanted a special tête-a-tête. And so it was, with a traditional French Christmas meal cooked and served at home. Just the two of us, enjoying Christmas Day together.

During the festive week we then met with many friends and spent several evenings enjoying apéros and nibbles and long conversations to discover how everyone had been spending this traditional family time.

For St. Sylvestre - New Year's Eve, we were invited by our friends from Nantes to spend the evening at their home with friends and family in the village. This was a beautiful way to bring in the New Year so we gladly accepted their kind invitation.

This was a so typically French, south of France French, dinner, which, after a large selection of different mise en bouche apéros, started with a large plate containing loads of oysters, fresh from Brittany. Treats to follow included other specialities from our friend's home area, Brittany, with a small cassolette with Fois gras and apples, sanglier (boar) with cherries, potatoes gratinée and dressings.

"the meal started with a large plate containing loads of oysters..."

Then a wonderful selection of cheeses, including two our friends brought back from the UK - Cheddar and Cheshire (for David!). Finally, a traditional Christmas buche - a wonderful chocolate log made by Lucette, one of our friends.

Of course, we had champagne and quite a few bottles (we didn't count) of wine, both from St. Etienne and our village. As I said, a typical French New Years Eve celebration with friends to bring in 2010.

As a footnote we returned on New Years Day to share afternoon lunch with our friends. A totally different celebration to that enjoyed by over 300 people in nearby Cap d'Agde. They spent their New Year's Day on the naturist beach at Cap d'Agde enjoying the traditional midday plunge into the Mediterranean. Whilst I strongly recommend the Mediterranean for swimming during the holidays I can't quite say that it's at it's best on New Year's day. Even though we had a typical blue sky with lots of sunshine, the temperature of the sea was not that we have during the summer - for sure! The photo below, published from the local Midi Libre newspaper, shows some of the swimmers as they take the plunge. Brrrr... that's cold