Our Parisian Christmas Day began at midnight when we attended midnight mass at Notre Dame. We arrived at about 10:30pm (the Lonely Planet had said get there by 11), but the gigantic cathedral was already packed to the rafters and it was the quick and the dead in getting seats. Hundreds if not thousands stood. Prior to the midnight mass, there was a program of organ music, the choir and a "sound and light" show telling the story of Christ's birth. We are pretty secular people, but the whole event was very impressive and moving, especially the entry of the "archeveche" and his party on the stroke of midnight. The cathedral uses modern technology, and numerous flat screen TV's relay the "action" to people not near the front.
Overnight and in the early morning, we used Skype to talk to friends and rels all over Australia. Skype is wonderful (cheap and convenient), but its sound and picture quality is quite variable, maybe dependent on bandwidth and traffic, and still has a way to go. Our clapped-out laptop probably doesn't help, especially since we later noticed it had been pottering away doing a scheduled anti-virus scan during all this.
Not knowing what to expect (and noticing that businesses conspicuously do not show notices in advance saying what they will be doing over Christmas) we prepared in advance for Christmas day, by having all 3 meals organised in our apartment. It was totally unnecessary! Christmas Day is just another day in Paris, and expecially in our area, the Marais. By about midday, not all but most of the stores and cafes and bars and boulangeries were open and trading normally. The big department stores, post offices, museums are certainly closed, and the motor traffic was noticeably less than usual, but other than that, everything was going. The streets were crowded with pedestrian families. How different to Australia, but as Clare points out, we don't really know what's open in Sydney around Bondi Beach and Circular Quay on Christmas Day - probably quite a lot, to cope with (or exploit) the tourists.
So we joined everyone else and had a big walk in the afternoon and evening, spending about 6 hours on our feet, before we caught the Metro home. We rejected our first choice for a coffee break (about 4pm) because the maitre-d' tried to sit us next to a group clouded in cigarette smoke. He told us nowhere else was available. He said "next year there will be no smoking". We said "next week!" He agreed, and invited us back then.
It's no news that there are many beautiful churches in Paris, and we touched on some of them today, in particular, St Merri in Rue St Martin (where we saw a feast being enjoyed by people we assumed to be the local underprivileged, see photo); St Eustache at Les Halles (a most glorious building, see photo of stained glass); St Honore, and la Madeleine (where we enjoyed an awesome organ recital). Parisian churches are inspiring on Christmas Day!
We took our photo in the most beautiful Place Vendome (featuring yet another memorial to Napoleon - this time he's in disguise as a Roman emperor, but we left it out of the photo), and enjoyed looking at the swish hotels and the specialist food stores in the La Madeleine part of town. Most of the latter were closed, so we weren't tempted to buy.
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