Last Sunday we dashed out to catch the final moments of Villamblard's marché de Noël, which was actually organized by the local British community. We were nearly the only people there thanks to the driving rain. A lonely Père Noël sat on the stage, waving at us, but neither child wanted anything to do with him, even though they suspected there might be candy involved.
I covet the handmade paniers people use for shopping -- the perfect present for the Luddite on your shopping list-- and they come in quite a lot of different shapes depending on what you plan to be carrying around, and contrasting colors of wicker if that has an appeal, but I was not in the mood for comparing and thinking about exactly which shape and color to get. So I bought fudge instead, from two smiling Englishwomen. This area of France is home to many transplanted Brits, which is nothing new; Aquitaine, the land of the Hundred Years' War, has been fought over endlessly and even held by the British for long stretches.
After the fudge I was mesmerized by a display of local honeys of different types and depths of color. I ended up getting miel de forêt, although I have no idea what "honey of the forest" might mean. It is very dark and very thick. "Merci," I said to the vendor, after handing over my euros. "C'est très...ombruese, ne'st-ce pas?" It's very shadowy. Well, he knew what I meant.
Next, off to the neighboring village of Beleymas, much smaller than Villamblard, no commerce at all, and deeply peaceful (that's Beleymas above). Beleymas had sent out flyers announcing a fête with les guignols, which we didn't feel we could miss since we didn't exactly know what it was.
We stepped into the small salle culturelle to find Père Noël getting smooches and passing out presents to all the children from Beleymas. Rosy-cheeked toddlers were hurling wrappings into the air, grandmothers were bending down to see the new toys, the sounds of several electronic keyboards beeping at once. We were greeted by a smiling white-haired woman that I had never seen before, who said, oh, you live in Villamblard, yes?
Well, yes. It is unsettling to realize that we are not, as I like to pretend, going through our days under a cloak of invisibility. People we don't know know who we are and where we live. It's not that I mind. But it clashes with my sense of how things are.
Eventually Les Guignols began, with three oldish men dressed in various homemade costumes clowning about. Early on, the classic -- one of the clowns squirted the oldest one, dressed in a top hat and very shiny waistcoat, in the face with water squirting out of a flower, and then doused the shrieking audience -- after that, Julian was entirely won over. I'm always laughing to myself when Julian gets interested in something and forgets to pretend he doesn't understand French.
Many of the skits involved setting off firecrackers under someone's nose or getting a person from the audience up on stage and making them put on costumes -- a young girl was chosen for a princess costume for a Shrek sequence that eventually led to Smashmouth's "Hey now, get your game on, go plaaaaay" booming from the loudspeakers. An old man with an elegant gray moustache was brought up on stage to chuckling that quickly turned to hilarity when he was dressed in a pleated miniskirt, a shirt with Charlotte aux fraises on it, a kitty peeping out of his handbag, and a large hat fashioned to look like a giant strawberry. A teenaged boy was dressed as a pirate, told to sit in a big boat flying the pirate flag -- and with another great burst of firecrackers, the side of the boat dropped down and he was shown to be sitting on a chair over a bucket. In the head, in other words.
So to sum up: cross-dressing, public humiliation, American culture, potty humor, and firecrackers, all with a set and costumes that cost around $4. We adored every second of it. Not to mention the fudge.
