[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=]LAST WEEK I was driving through Paris with a bunch of American journalists. One of them mentioned that the last time he’d been in Paris, there had been a big Ferris wheel in the Tuileries gardens, as there is every summer. Then someone else mentioned the subtlety with which the city’s civil engineers had designed and positioned the ride: If you stand in the center of the Arc de Triomphe and look down the Avenue des Champs Elysées, the wheel’s hub is superimposed on the tip of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, so it looks as if the obelisk is holding the thing up like a pinwheel. Following the despicable rule that the more deeply impressed one is, the less impressed one should appear, I said, “So much of French design is like that. It’s like a couple of kids got together and said, Hey! This’d be neat!”
Had I been one of the people with me, I would have laughed in my face. Because if Paris didn’t impress me, then what was my idea of elegant design? My front yard? My laundry room? But the first of my colleagues to speak was slightly less jaded (or slightly less of a jerk), and said, “Yes, but the whole secret of Paris is that it so often is neat.”
He has a point, particularly these days. In no season is Paris neater than at Christmas. All the shopping streets have their trees and lamps strung with lights. The department store displays are ingenious. Galéries Lafayette, on the Boulevard Haussmann, has bulbs strung along the whole of its football-field-sized façade to resemble a blue, red, green, yellow, and white cathedral. The Hédiard épicerie in the Place de la Madeleine has an incredibly real-looking illuminated ribbon pulled around it, so the whole building appears to have been wrapped as a present. And the Madeleine itself has a watery pattern of wavy blue lights playing on it all evening long.
But the best-decorated store in all of Paris is across the river. The Bon Marché on the Rue de Sèvres is lit in a very simple way: It just has billows of twinkling, snowy bulblets in one monochrome field. But beneath them, every window display in the store is filled with a different “Nutcracker”-style mechanical gizmo: hammering elves, rotating tops, spinning ballerinas, puppet musicians. And in a touching seasonal exception to Paris’s default position of extreme child-unfriendliness, there are little stiles of three-inch-high steps leading up to gangplanks running along the displays so children can climb up and press their runny noses against the glass.
For a country that according to cliché has spent the last hundred years of its politics trying to expunge every remaining vestige of Christianity from its public life, France puts an implausible amount of effort into prettying up the place for the holy season. This earnestness about Christmastime seems to be un-uprootable from the French as a people, since it follows them even into immigration. When I was a child outside of Boston, it was to the French-Canadian neighborhoods in Salem–with their double-decker houses blanketed or boxed or crisscrossed with the wildest blue, green, red, purple, and orange lights, and illuminated reindeer on the roofs and Santas in the yards–that my parents would drive us for a real kid-dazzling treat.
Where’d the French get this knack? Someone once described France as a “high-context” society. I wouldn’t dare try to explain what that means, except to say that, in the context of Christmas, the French are rather the opposite of the blasé and jaded lot that they try to pass themselves off as. Which is to say, they’re the opposite of what Americans actually are at Christmastime. Given half a chance, the French are both a lot more earnest and a lot more joyous.
On every street corner in Paris you can smell Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Ever smell them in America? I doubt it. The guy who wrote the Nat King Cole song was probably named Jacques. All over Paris in the winter months, you can see women in beautiful fur jackets and stoles. In Washington, meanwhile, the harridans of PETA spend the Christmas season slouching back and forth in front of Neiman Marcus baying for “animal rights,” while their male fellow-activists–next to whom your average French coiffeur looks like John Wayne–threaten to throw paint on old ladies wearing fur (but not on young delinquents wearing leather).
To spend the Christmas season in Paris is to realize just how . . . how Jacobin our own Christmases have become. And that, for this month at least, we’re among the last people who should dismiss the French as a bunch of humorless, effete, preening, hypocritical snobs.
–Christopher Caldwell
