I’m thrilled that I’ll be spending Christmas back home this year, but I must say: the French certainly have an extraordinary way of celebrating.
This past weekend I went with some French friends to see a spectacle that they had been hyping up for weeks. “Allison, you will just die I think.” “We cannot wait to watch your face! Americans always love this.”
Having seen the French idea of spectacle before, I wasn’t so jazzed. Sure, they have some fun, but it usually pales in comparison to American showmanship. But this past weekend, I experienced festivities that would put Dolly herself to shame.
The Fête des lumières, or Festival of Lights, is a centuries-old celebration in Lyon. The whole city lights up in projections, LED bulbs, and fires. It is a celebration of a lot of things, mostly religious, but overall it is just an excuse to eat good food and see cool things in the city.
There’s a fun little coincidence at play as well. The fathers of modern cinema, the Lumière brothers, were born and raised in Lyon. The studio where they built the first moving picture camera is a 25-minute walk from my apartment. The festival came before them, but because of the happenstance with the name, the city now includes honors to the brothers in the celebrations.
The old city, the part with narrow medieval streets, is done up with garlands and fairy lights. Every street corner has a man selling some sort of snack: raclette, oysters, crêpes. And a woman beside him ladling mulled wine out of a big copper pot.
The sounds are just as exciting. French spoken in accents from all over the country, and even the island territories; pockets of Chinese, Japanese, Korean; rare bits of English, and if I turned around to catch it in time, it was usually someone I knew. People with accordions, violins, guitars, jingle bells. Troups of drummers and entire horn sections marching down the winding streets, not part of a parade, just voluntarily making music. A procession of solemn people with candles following a fiberglass statue of the Virgin Mary up a steep hill, humming a durge.
And oh, the church, the church, the church. I can’t upload videos on this website for some reason, but I wish I could. My French friends brought me in front of St. Jean’s Cathedral, an exceptionally old building with a neat plaza out front. The sun was going down quickly, and workers in pink vests passed out candles. I didn’t know what we were waiting for. Once the light of the sun finally dipped away, one of my friends turned me to face the cathedral and said “Attends, regardes.”
The building was illuminated. A projection was displayed across the face of the church, emphasizing its windows and stained glass. The projection was powerful enough, and it was dark enough, that when the windows began to move, and the people in the stained glass came to life, it looked completely real. It was mesmerizing.
If the cathedral’s performance was religious and reverent, the performance at the Museum of Fine Arts was its opposite. The museum is part of a huge central square surrounded by tall buildings, and instead of just the museum getting a projection, the square was covered. I felt surrounded on all sides by noise and images. The projections were of famous portraits in the museum, edited to make their mouths and bodies move to the music. Marie Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte were singing an ABBA duet while cherubs backed them up on flutes. Many of the songs were unrecognized by me, but my French friends new every word. When it changed to Maria Carey, every person in that square (all 800 of us) knew to hit the whistle tones.
The city was transformed into a completely free, completely open playland for everybody. There were interactive sculptures, food, games, performances. Have you ever been to the Opryland Hotel at Christmas? Imagine a city, an ancient city, done up just like that. And everybody’s welcome. Don’t worry about parking — it’s happening just outside your door.
An incredible facet of this is that every window, from the bottom floor shops to the top floor apartments, was lined with little tea candles. The legend says that the Virgin Mary spared the city from a terrible plague some hundreds of years ago, so we light the candles to honor her. I’m telling you, every window had a candle. When I finally made it back to my apartment, I found tea candles in the back of my pantry and set them out, if only to match my neighbors.
Lyon is a really special place.
Bises,
Allison
Flan in France 