It has been rainy and dark in Paris these past few days, and I had been cooped up in the house all day. When the rain finally stopped around five o'clock, I put on my boots and headed down the stairs for a badly needed walk. When I got to the bottom, I saw someone struggling in the elevator. The shadow bobbed up and down and couldn't seem to get the door open. Thinking it was a child, I opened the door and my neighbor Anne almost fell out. She was in jeans and no makeup, looking a bit disheveled, and trying to lift a big carton of wine glasses.
"I hope it wasn't too much noise for you yesterday," she said apologetically. Come to think of it, there had been a lot of noise of feet and something rolling back and forth. Our apartment building looks grand, but inside the floors and ceilings could be made of paper for all the noise protection they offer.
"It wasn't bad," I said. My kids used to make a lot of noise too, and our neighbors downstairs never complained. "Was it a birthday party?"
She stood up and wiped her brow. "It was a christening!" she said. "For Valentine [the baby]. There were 100 people!"
I held the door open for her as I tried to absorb this figure. It's actually typical to have a huge party for a christening, a First Communion, and a confirmation in France, the former "eldest daughter of the Church"-- unlike the U.S. where religious events are mostly private, small family matters. The funny thing is that France is much less religious than the U.S. and less than 10 % of French people set foot in a church even once a year.
I once attended a meeting in Paris where twenty or so couples were being taught the meaning of baptism by a local priest. He went around the room asking each pair of new parents why they wanted to christen their child. It was usually some variation of "to please my family" or "to continue the tradition." Once everyone had spoken, the priest, a young man, sat for a moment, looking sad.
"Not one of you mentioned God or the name Jésus-Christ," he said.
In the U.S., he could just have refused to christen the children. But he went on manfully through the instructions. At the end of the session, all the parents received a date for their child's christening... and its party, with the priest duly invited (and tipped).
Anne was returning some nice glasses to my ground-floor neighbor. She pulled out a pretty little box tied with green ribbon and said, "Here, take some dragées. I have a ton left over!"
Dragées, usually tied with ribbon and netting, are de rigueur as party favors for christenings. They are little candied almonds, usually blue and white for boys, pink and white for girls, and often silver, too. These were delicious.