It's Me, Sara Louise

Since my childhood Christmases belonged to New York, I grew up with a traditional winter wonderland holiday. Because of that, I never got fully accustomed to the warm Christmases of Texas or the dark, wet ones of Dublin (although it did snow buckets that one year), but I have to say, waking up to this Côte d’Azur Christmas Eve wasn’t too shabby.

The boys started their day sipping store bought Starbucks lattes (now available in supermarkets in France… woohoo) and reading celebrity gossip rags brought over from England by Mommy London while us ladies came up with our plan for the day… first up, torturing Gregory by giving him his ugly Christmas sweater…

He loved it. Second on the list, get rid of the boys. That one was easy, that went out to buy seafood for our Christmas Eve dinner and were gone A L L  D A Y.
Since they were gone we were free to do whatever we wanted which meant putting on our new matching Christmas jammies (I’m more than a little bummed that I didn’t snap a photo) and kicking off the Christmas Eve revelry with a bottle of white from Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

That’s right boys and girls, not only does Châteauneuf-du-Pape make amazing reds but their whites are pretty darn tasty too…. so you can put that in your wine glass and sip it.

What wasn’t on our Christmas Eve plan however was Mrs.London’s toenail popping off. You read that correctly, her toenail popped off (she had dropped a weight on it a couple of weeks back so it was only a matter of time really).

There we were, sitting on the couch in our Christmas jammies, sipping our wine and being merry, when she suddenly looked up and shouted, “it’s gone!“
Mommy London and I shot back, “what’s gone?” and then that’s when we saw it… in the place of where a black polished toe nail should have been, there was nothing. G R O S S.

And then of course we had to look for it. There were two dogs running about the house, the only thing grosser than losing a toenail, would be to find one of the dogs chewing on it. How’s that for festive fun?

Eventually the boys returned and we sat down for our Christmas Eve dinner; shrimp, mussels, oysters, and smoked salmon. We were feeling mighty fishy.

(Do you see that plate of shrimp? Well there was a lot of shrimp, loads of it, and Mommy London and I tore into it and with every bite, we said how delicious it was. So imagine our surprise when the next morning Gregory rather excitedly said, “Oh! We still have all of that shrimp to eat!” Somehow in his oyster and mussel haze he didn’t even notice the shrimp on the table. How’s that for being observant?)

After dinner we retired to the couch for some Christmas television viewing. And then Mr. London disappeared and never returned… instead we got Sassy Iron Man in his place.

Naturally Gregory took one look at Sassy Iron Man and decided that Alpine Man needed to make an appearance. (There isn’t any such thing as Alpine Man but Gregory in his Nordic-like onesie needed a superhero name so Alpine Man it was.)

And then of course Sassy Iron Man and Alpine Man had to battle it out for Christmas Eve domination with the help of Fifty who apparently can shoot laser beams out of his eyeballs.