La chandeleur

Françoise had Alan and me over for dinner last night, and as it turns out, this was a good night to be eating with a French person. The second of February is "La chandeleur," which basically means you eat crepes. Looking up the details, it appears that the origin is actually pagan--the Romans used to celebrate the god Pan on this day, carrying torches through the city ("chandelle" means candle). Then the Christians came to power and replaced the pagan holiday with one of their own, celebrating Jesus's presentation to the temple forty days after his birth. You lit a candle at the church and then tried to make it back home with the candle still lit. If you succeeded, it was sure that you would not die in the coming year. Now, where do the crepes come in? There seem to be a couple superstitions: if you don't have crepes on February 2nd, your flour will go bad. If you flip the crepe with your right hand while holding a gold coin in your left, you'll be financially secure for the rest of the year. You also had to fold the gold coin into the crepe and then throw it on top of your cupboard, to stay there until next year. And yes, you did scrape up the remains of last year's rotted crepe; the first poor person to come to your door would receive last year's gold coin.

In any case, we had various mixes of ham, cheese, egg, and mushrooms in our savory crepes; the sweet ones involved butter, sugar, nutella, and jam. There were no candles or gold coins involved, so we'll see how that pans out for us.

Other happenings: the parents have booked flight, hotel, and Mom and I have Eurostar tickets to get to England...yesss, we're going to Scarborough! Alan and I have booked our trip as well...we're heading to Carcassonne, a walled medieval city 20 miles from the Mediterranean. Three weeks until Winter Break, and counting. Teaching is getting better, I've been trying to use more music/film clips in class to get away from the monotony of "read this article, discuss." There's only so much of that the kids support before they threaten to go comatose.