What Happens When You Transplant a Frenchman into Australia for Christmas? Christmas Conflicts

A few years ago, my French husband Maxime and I were set to travel back to Australia for Christmas, as we did every other year. We had one last lunch with French friends before the flight. They were curious to know what an Australian Christmas was like.

‘And the family in Australia … do you fit in?’ Sebastien asked Maxime as he swirled a glass of Alsace Riesling.

‘Oh yes,’ said Maxime easily.

‘Err … it wasn’t always that way,’ I reminded him.

‘Oh, well, yes. The first Christmas there, I made a few mistakes,’ Maxime confessed, referring to his first ever visit to Australia, when things had gone ... interestingly. Especially where food was concerned. ‘At Christmas,' Maxime continued, 'they have this sort of gummy cake, the Christmas pudding. And they serve it with some sort of amorphous mass.’

The amorphous mass he was referring to was actually brandy butter. My sister’s girlfriend Wendy the Fluorescent (named for her colourful tracksuits) was immensely proud of her contribution to Christmas dinner. She was thought by everyone to have considerable pudding savoir-faire, and had spent the entirety of Christmas morning whipping up a special brandy butter flavoured with Cointreau.

‘When they put it on the table,’ Maxime said, ‘I made a remark about its appearance that wasn’t appreciated.’

‘Um, actually you said it looked like vomit,’ I said.

‘Oh putain!’ laughed Sebastien.

When Maxime had offered this choice observation that first Christmas lunch, there’d been a pause as everyone tried to decide whether or not he had really just described Wendy’s labour of love as vomit. Eventually deciding vomit must be French for lovely or something, people got on with their pudding.

But it wasn’t just brandy butter that got Maxime into hot water that first Christmas in Australia. My family were meeting him for the first time, and were expecting a polished, sophisticated European.  Mum had been vacuuming the house twice a day for weeks in preparation for his visit. To be fair, Maxime CAN do a decent line in polished and sophisticated at home in France. But somehow in Australia, it all unravelled. I suppose it was because all the rules are different here – when there are any.

And prehaps the little gastronomic shocks Maxime had to cope with rattled him. The first in store was when he discovered that at lunchtime, rather than coq au vin, Australians ate square pieces of bread. ('You eat sandwiches? Every day?' he'd said.)  But it was our Australian Christmas Eve that really took the cake (or the presliced bread). The thing is that since Mum would be doing a lot for Christmas dinner the following day, we’d decided to order takeaway pizza for dinner on Christmas Eve. When it arrived, the boxes were arrayed on the kitchen table and Dad got out some tumblers and a bottle of milk.

Maxime had stared at the table in utter horror.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked in concern.

‘It’s December the 24^th!’ Maxime squeaked.

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘But it is Christmas!’

‘No no,’ I said. ‘That’s tomorrow.’

‘No! Christmas is today.’

‘What?’

‘In France, we celebrate Christmas on December the 24^th.’

Oh shit. It was French Christmas Day! Maxime would normally have been feasting on canard à l’orange and champagne and here he was with a bendy slice of pizza and a glass of milk. Maxime nibbled his slice weakly.

After the shock of celebrating French Christmas with takeaway pizza, Maxime was perhaps not in the best frame of mind to celebrate Australian Christmas the next day. He perked up a bit just before lunch when someone offered him a glass of champagne, but sagged again when I was forced to admit that it wasn’t real champagne, it was just a five dollar bottle of Aussie bubbly. By the time he got to the brandy butter, Maxime’s gastronomic expectations had sunken considerably. Although to think he was being served vomit was maybe going a bit far.

Christmas food ...who knew it could be so contentious?

And so our Christmas had continued. After lunch, Mum asked Maxime if he’d like to take a look at our garden. We all knew that the garden was Mum’s pride and joy. Well, all of us except Maxime. We were all waiting for him to say ‘I’d be delighted’ and so we were a bit taken aback when Maxime said, ‘Oh, no thanks’.

Maxime had made the mistake of thinking Mum was asking if he genuinely wanted to walk around and look at her climbing roses. ‘In France, you show respect to your guest by making them comfortable, you fit in with their wishes,’ Maxime explained to me later.

Sadly, Mum just thought that all this was not because he was French, but because he was a philistine.

The failed garden tour was followed by a BBQ on Christmas night. My uncle was doling out drinks. He gave Maxime a glass of sparkling wine which he called champagne. I winced, but Maxime accepted it with reasonable grace and took a sip. Then he promptly spat it out on the lawn. We stared at him aghast.

‘It’s corked,’ Maxime said. Then he saw everyone staring at him open-mouthed. ‘What?’ he said.  

Maxime simply couldn’t understand what everyone was upset about. ‘They get offended as if they made the wine themselves!’ he said.

We left Australia after that Christmas having offended most of my friends and relatives, all of whom urged me to ditch the rude Frog.

But I didn't of course and things are different now. Maxime has leant to feign interest in gardening where appropriate, and my family expect him to do strange things with wine. And nobody forces him to eat takeaway pizza on Christmas Eve. He has fish and chips.

The Victorian State Election: As Seen By a Frog

My French husband Maxime is in self-imposed political exile.

Well, sort of. At any rate, when we lived in France, he announced to friends that if it came down to Hollande versus Sarkozy in the second round of voting for president in 2012, he would emigrate to Australia. And so … he emigrated to Australia. Nor, in his disgust, did he bother to vote in 2012, since in France, voting is optional. Some people think that’s more democratic, but how representative is a government that’s voted in by a measly 30% or so of the population (and zero Maximes)?  Even the ancient Greeks realised that people need a little prod to make democracy work. Well, to the extent that it can.

I voted in the 2012 French presidential second round, however. I’d only just got my new, shiny French citizenship and voting rights, and I wanted a ‘go’ of them! On the sunny voting day morning of the 2012 election, I walked down to our local hall in Alsace to vote. The streets were deserted. The only faces I saw were those on the election posters (I noted with amusement that someone had drawn a Hitler moustache on Sarkozy). It was so quiet at the polling station the only thing missing was a couple of tumbleweeds floating by and a whistling, empty-sounding wind.

Not only was there no queue at the polling station, but voting itself was over in a literal click of a button - a simple click on a computer panel for Sarko or Holloande and Bob’s your president. I have to say, it was a bit dissatisfying. I’d had to wait four years for my French citizenship, fill out around one billion forms, and have the foreign police visit my house to check that I was really married and not in a ‘mariage blanc’ (the Frog’s underwear hanging to dry all over the lounge probably convinced them). After all that effort, I wanted a bit more fanfare as I exercised my rights for the first time. I wanted a few more boxes to tick and people to choose from and a senate paper the length of the Seine like we have in Australia. It was like looking forward to Christmas and then waking up on Christmas morning to find you have only one present. Not that politicians are much like Christmas presents. Maybe it’s like Christmas when all you get is socks.

But what I wanted even more than a smorgasbord of political choice on that French election day was a sausage. I wanted the traditional Aussie post-vote reward of a freshly sizzled snag from a stall outside the polling station run to support a local school or kinder.

How different it was when I voted during last Saturday’s Victorian State election. In the car on the way to the local school, I heard on the radio that there are even websites advising people on what food is available at whichelection station. Even sites that rate the quality of your snag!

Returning home from voting (and sausage consumption), I announced triumphantly to Maxime that I had the answer to France’s abysmal voter turnout issues:

‘You need sausage sizzles in France – you’d improve the voter turnout no end.’

‘Yeah! True!’ agreed Maxime, perking up as usual at the mention of food.

I wondered how come the French of all people haven’t come up with a foodie solution for their voting issues. Maybe if Sarkozy had been out flipping burgers in 2012 he would’ve got over the line (OK, perhaps only if he'd provided foie gras burgers). What’s more, Maxime himself is proof that intelligent use of food would work in French election campaigns: once, he even tried to vote for a sausage - le Chien Saucisse, a sausage-dog running for the seat of Marseille. (Sadly, however, we'd not been in Marseille, but in Alsace, and no sausage-y candiates were running.) Maxime’s estimation of French politicians also correlates suspiciously with their appreciation of wine. Come to think of it, why not have a ‘vin d’honneur’ after voting – a free glass of wine just like they have after wedding ceremonies in France (and after just about any other official occasion except, apparently, voting).

Speaking of Frenchmen and elections, you might be wondering what interest Maxime has shown in the Victorian election. Not being an Australian citizen, he can’t vote, so you mightn't expect him to get too excited about it. Nevertheless, his interest might have been engaged had it not been for the fact that the main issue of debate (apart from federal politics) seemed to have been over Melbourne’s east-west link. (Not only does the link lack interest for Frenchmen, the poor ol’ regional Victorians must be feeling a little under-cherished given the central focus of the election too.)

‘Why don’t they join up that road-in-the-north-whatever-it’s-called to the Eastern road and complete the ring road?’ Maxime asked me. ‘A city the size of Melbourne deserves a ring. The ring might be longer but it must be cheaper than digging up the city. I’m in favour of doing things the proper way, not the shitty way.’

Thus Maxime dealt with the east-west link project with typical French harshness (perhaps the frog smelt a rat!), and after this, he largely lost interest. What he’d REALLY like to see is laws relaxed to allow you to drive at your speed of choice after a seven course lunch with matching wines and possibly coffee and a balloon of Armangac, but no-one seemed to be running on that.

‘And the Melbourne public transport is a joke for a population its size,’ Maxime had added.

‘We’ve got the same make of tram as Alsace,’ I said lamely.

The Frog shrugged.

Regarding Melbourne’s public transport, it’s true that I ‘ve been shocked myself to find that after 13 years away, the Melbourne transport network hasn’t changed even though the city has at least half a million more people in it. In that same period of time in France, Alsace was connected to Paris and Dijon by a super-fast TGV, and our local area in Alsace got a new tram network. And this was all apparently without people even bothering to vote for it.

Ah well. There may be a lack of Aussie candidates at elections proposing Frog-approved infrastructure, but at least here, I get my sausage ‘n’ sauce!