Christmas Eve in France, and the shops are empty!

[scouserabroad]

I went to our local Lidl and Super U with two young children, at 11 a.m this morning. It was absolutely fine . No playing dodgems with shopping trolleys, no fights over the last .

Do the French not do last minute Christmas Eve shopping? Are they all at home with their families sitting around the Christmas tree eating buche au chocolat or something? Or is this just one of the advantages of living in the middle of nowhere

Bonnes fetes de fin d'année

My local supermarket (just outside Brussels) was practically deserted this morning. The people I did see only had baskets and were buying bread and bits and bobs. They were a bit agog at my trolley heaving with drink food.

The bestest thing is the absence of Slade's Merry Christmas, although for some, it may induce incredible home-sickness.

I was at a college 'gouter' yesterday, and it was lovely, very low-key, disorganised in a French way, but calmly happy.

Don't really know why, Scouser, I think possibly because it's only 1 day that the shops are closed, so it's really like Sunday. It's not so long ago in the UK, that when Christmas Day was a Saturday, nothing opened again until the Wednesday.

Also, people generally order their seafood platters/champagne in advance, so there's not the panicky race round the supermarket to fill the trolley to cover all possibilities of unexpected guests/allergies/dislikes etc

Well the local supermarket near us in eastern Brussels was packed this afternoon, maybe because you can access it directly from the metro station without going outside and the only safe way to travel anywhere in Brussels today was metro/train/few tram routes, since we are under huge amounts of snow. Then when I past the local traiteur, man there was the hugest queue I've ever seen there, people collecting their homard for tonight, I wanted to buy some apéros but the queue was at least an hour long.