Auntie Murielle's Christmas log

When one evokes Christmas, I don't know what comes first to my mind: Is it the strong scent of the scented candles "Fir Thorns" in Aunt Murielle's house, or the disgusting Christmas Yule Log of the latter?

Last year she made a Yule Log with white chocolate and passion fruit on Christmas Eve. Even today, I still have the feeling that the horrible variant of this delicious traditional French dessert haunts me. The sponge cake was dry, and the overflowing vanilla butter mousse that covered it, or should I say, suffocated it, far too sweet. Whose idea was it to invent white chocolate in the first place? It was nothing like real chocolate with a complex and intense taste, no: it is so sweet that when you eat a tile of it you feel your throat burning in the same way as with condensed milk. For me, white chocolate is a strange creation of Man, just like cherry liqueur chocolates. And why on earth would you mix it with exotic fruits?

"Lea, you're too hard on Auntie, my older sister Anna told me. She does her best to feed the people at this table.”

We were four to celebrate Christmas at Auntie Murielle's last year. As well as the previous one, and the one before that. Auntie Murielle, Uncle Thierry, Anna and me. This year we would add Thomas, Anna's boyfriend. The poor guy didn't know what was waiting for him.

With my head resting against the window of my plane bound for Toulouse, in the Haute-Garonne, I sighed. I'm nineteen years old now, and Christmas has never been fun. The truth is that I don't feel particularly comfortable around my family. I guess they must have seen me for a long time as a grumpy child, then as a rebellious teenager (I just often dressed in black), then as the young Parisian woman who grumbles all the time that I am today. And maybe it's for the best: they're good people, but we just don't have the same interests. Auntie Murielle, my mother's sister, has been retired for a few years. She spends a lot of time watching reality TV shows, especially cooking shows. Programs that, from an objective point of view, don't help her improve her cooking skills at all. As a child, I tended to run away from her, not being used to the effusions of love that are characteristic of the character. With Anna, we lived almost every weekend at her house during our junior high and high school years, boarding school the rest of the time.

I can see that everyone is waiting for this period, for the gifts, for the evenings we spend wrapped up, hot chocolate in hand, in a big plaid in front of Christmas movies, and above all, for this strange concept that is "The magic of Christmas". As far as I am concerned, I had planned this year to spend Christmas alone, working at McDonald's, a job that allowed me to pay a part of my eight square meter Parisian apartment’s rent. There it was, the real magic: to become a freelance journalist in the right way, and to go far away, to Japan or New Zealand, to start my life from scratch. That was without counting the call a month earlier from Anna, who had stayed to live close to my family in Toulouse, in the south of France.

"You’re joking, right ? Lea, there's no way you're spending Christmas alone. You're coming back here right away. Besides, Thomas is coming this year."

So here I am one evening of December 23rd, in a plane landing for Toulouse. I brought back with me a bottle of good wine, as well as a box of chocolates (dark, of course), my meager savings allowing me nothing more.

As I leave the airport, I feel the sharp and pungent cold making the tip of my nose blush and rush everywhere in my clothes. I immediately see Anna. I see her smile behind the cloud of steam she exhales. She inherited my father's German origins: Five foot nine inches tall, blonde, slim and athletic, she must make my parents proud. She has a master's degree in Business and Marketing option Luxury, and is currently working as an executive in a high-flying wedding dress boutique. She jumps into my arms: I haven't seen her since I started my second year, almost five months ago.

"Hi, my little sister! You haven't grown up," she laughs affectionately at my five foot two inches tall. Thomas ! comes to load her suitcase in the trunk.

We have to admit that we are opposites. I'm short and my curly, brown, square-cut hair seems to be constantly tangled, and you can tell from my slight overweight figure that I may be taking a little too much advantage of the reduced menus that McDonalds offers its employees. Anna is simply adorable: She's sociable and selfless, the kind of girl everyone loves. On the way to the house on the outskirts of Toulouse, I get some news about the family and meet Thomas. He seems to be a nice boy: Auntie Murielle will be delighted.

I can see my aunt and uncle's house from afar: it seems to be entirely decorated with blinding garlands, flickering randomly, in disorder. The changing lights highlight the scrolls of smoke coming out of the chimney.

Once parked in front of the house, I barely have time to get my suitcases out of the trunk when I am violently crushed against an Auntie Murielle who hugs me as if she hadn't seen me for decades, almost as strong as the smell of her Cologne attacking my nose, head pressed against her voluptuous chest.

"Oh, Lea, darling! Your flight went well ? she exclaimed before bending over gently to bring her mouth closer to my ear. I'm sorry your parents couldn't come.”

My parents were never there. They are not bad people, they didn't abandon us. They are careerists, real workaholics, constantly on the move all over France, Germany and Switzerland. With Anna, we never had a real home. They haven't come for Christmas for maybe five or six years, and I haven't seen them for at least a year. We exchange news from time to time, and they finance my studies, as well as part of my apartment. For them, we have been just another one of their goals to achieve. Perfect strangers.

“Don't worry, I replied, clumsily giving her back her embrace, We were expecting it, we've been used to it for a long time.”

She joyfully jumped on Thomas and bombarded him with questions "Are you hungry? Did you ride well? Oh, there can't be many people on the roads these days. Are you hungry, tell me?". I walked towards the house, dragging my suitcase behind me on the gravel in front of the front door.

The entrance opens onto a small living room with a country look: large dark wooden furniture surrounds the room, including a full bookcase and a cupboard storing porcelain figurines, one of my aunt's hobbies, which she likes to show off to the best advantage having at their bases small lace chaperons. The heat immediately comes to warm my limbs numb from the cold: a fire slowly crackles in the chimney. Around it are placed large comfortable armchairs in red leather. On one of them sits Uncle Thierry, legs crossed with his eternal serious air. He looks up at his political newspaper, "Le Point", to fix me over his glasses:

"Welcome home, kid," he says.

I think I can see a warm glow passing through his eyes. I blush and turn my head away. "Home”. Saved by the bell, I hear my aunt and the two lovers coming behind me.

“Okay, she exclaims, I will warm up the orange capon now that everyone is here. (I grimace) Why don't you go and get settled in, and I'll call you when dinner is served."

A few minutes later, I smoke a cigarette in the window of what has always been my room at Auntie Murielle's house. I owe this bad habit to the stress of living in Paris, my exhausting job and my complicated studies. The freezing cold of that winter night creeps into the room. I take a long, satisfying breath, which immediately relieves my boiling mind.

"Damn, I don't like Christmas," I whispered to myself as I slowly exhaled the smoke.

"That's not what I would say."

I am startled and although caught in the act, I try in an immature reflex to hide my cigarette by throwing it out the window. Shamefully, I turn to Thierry who, without raising his hand, walks towards me. Contemplating the black sky through the window, he does not cross my gaze.

“You've never been comfortable here, celebrating Christmas with us, he continues seriously. You would have preferred to celebrate with your parents when you were little, and that's normal. When you grew up, you never forgave them for not being here, and now you're mad at your whole family. "With a knot in my throat, I'm silent, and no one talks for what seems like hours. "Murielle has never been able to have children," he says.

"I'm sorry, I said, touched by this confession, I didn't know."

He sweeps away my words with a wave of his hand, his eyes still looking away.

"It was complicated at first. For years, in fact, he rectifies himself. Then she got you. With your sister, you changed her life. Our life. She may not have changed yours, but you saved hers. »

Without another word, without waiting for an answer, he turns his back and leaves. Tears come to my eyes.

It wasn't my parents who were there when Anna was left by her first boyfriend, nor when she broke her ankle at her track and field competition. They weren't there to comfort me when I found out that Santa Claus didn't exist, or when I won my first writing contest in college.

It was Auntie Murielle and Uncle Thierry.

My aunt who smells too much like Cologne, with her terrible way of applying her foundation in a thick layer, like plaster, and my too serious uncle, who enjoys reading political magazines, comfortably seated on his leather armchair. She who wanted to do everything too well and who sometimes got her brushes tangled between Anna's first name and mine, and him, discreet and always in restraint.

They never abandoned us as our parents did.

I feel a tear running down my cheek.

When I join them all at the table about fifteen minutes later, Aunt Murielle is telling Thomas about the time when, full of good intentions, we wanted to plant the Christmas tree in the garden.

"... So that he could supposedly go on living. What they hadn't understood was that it was made of plastic! " laughs my aunt

We all sneer, then raise our glass of sparkling apple cider to toast to Thomas, the "newcomer in the family", claimed Uncle Thierry with a smile in the direction of the person concerned. I revel in the thrill of this golden, fruity drink, as sweet as honey flowing down my throat.

“So Auntie, Anna said, staring at me mischievously. What flavor will your Christmas Yule Log have this year? »

"Oh, well, I thought of trying something new. This year it will be coffee and raspberry. Will that do? »

I smile.

"It will be perfect."