Chanukah/Christmas Fête!

Time for another catch-up installment! Last Friday, to celebrate the first night of Chanukah and Christmas and just the holiday season in general, me, Rachel (my roommate), and another assistant, Sara (who's also half-Jewish), threw a big party at my apartment. 

It felt a little early to have a Christmas party, but we wanted to have it before people started leaving for the holidays. In that respect, it was a great success--I think we had over 40 people come!!!

It wouldn't have been a holiday party without a Christmas tree, so I went to the Christmas market last Wednesday and bought a little Christmas tree and then trekked across town with it on the metro. It was hilarious, and I definitely got sap all over myself, but it was worth it. Below is our makeshift Christmas tree and then the real thing. A huge improvement, I think. :)

Sara came over Thursday night to start the party prep, and we spent way too many hours making paper snowflakes to hang and singing to ridiculous Christmas music. We had a little sleepover so we could wake up early to make another pumpkin pie (not traditionally eaten on Chanukah, but the first one was just TOO good). I took some better pictures of the process because it's still amazing to me to start with a real live pumpkin.

And of course it wouldn't be Chanukah without latkes so with all of us (Sara, Rachel, Alicia, and me) taking turns peeling and grating and chopping, we made over 100 latkes for the fete. 

It took forever but was soooooooooooo worth it. They may have been the best latkes I have ever tasted...even though they didn't look that appetizing. 

They were gone in .2 seconds at the party. :) I also made a random apple pie crumble (aka apple pumble) because I had way too many apples. And that was delicious too. Rachel made a TON of amazing Christmas cookies and a couple people brought other food too, so we had quite the spread.

After cooking all day, I had to run off to babysit for two hours--a little inconvenient, but I brought dreidels and candy so we just played dreidel for two hours. Wasn't too taxing. :) And PE and Aurore LOVED the gelt I brought them.

I raced home at 8 and JUST beat the first guest to my house. Phew. After most people had arrived, I lit the candles and was harassed into giving a shortened version of the Chanukah story since it seems that a surprising number of people (French, American, British, whoever) know nothing about Chanukah. Luckily, I had been talking about it with my students all week so I had it all down... 

Then we switched gears for a bit. We had asked everyone to bring a gift for a Yankee Swap and amazingly, with 35 people, we did a full round of Yankee Swap that lasted almost an hour! Most people had never heard of the game, but we conducted it all in French and eventually, once people had gotten the hang of it, there was a lot of stealing gifts back and forth. I think the most coveted gifts were some really nice soap and an English edition of The Little Prince. No one seemed that excited to steal the gift I gave--a banana with "It's the holidays--GO BANANAS!" written on it. :)

Then we proceeded to play a slightly altered version of dreidel that involved beer instead of chocolate coins. Suffice it to say, the altered version isn't quite as boring as the normal version generally is... But yeah, the party was a success. I think we managed to incorporate most American holiday traditions. We even had mistletoe that ingenious Alicia made out of green paper, sticks, and mints painted with red nail polish!

Because the annoying metro stops running at midnight and people were just having too much fun to leave, several people ended up staying over. Luckily, our amazing apartment came complete with a ginormous air mattress that has a built-in automatic blow-up contraption so all of our guests had a comfy place to sleep.

So comfy, in fact, that we ended up prolonging the sleepover through Saturday and into Sunday. The weather was kind of gross and cold so five of us basically just camped out on the air mattress and watched movies for two days straight. It was hilarious. We kept my apartment's automatic shutters down so it was permanently nighttime, and we started calling the apartment the "Time Capsule" because we never had any idea what time it was. We had to learn from Facebook on Sunday that it was snowing outside! Good times. We eventually had to venture outside because we ran out of food, but it was a nice, relaxing escape from reality.