Move over, Father Christmas, you're out of a job

Strange things happen when you move to another country and give up work. You know what it's like. Sometimes you find yourself having a conversation about feminism and before you know it you have agreed to dress up as Mary Christmas for a toddlers Christmas party, not so much in protest against the male-dominated world of Father Christmasses but more because your friend's husband has refused to do the job himself. It happens to everyone.

So there I was having a chat with my friend Katy about how the CERN Women's Club runs the toddlers group, and that the toddlers group itself is mostly populated by mothers rather than fathers, and so wouldn't it make sense to have a female 'father' Christmas. Indeed it would, I agreed, what a nice thought. A couple of weeks later, at 11am on a Tuesday morning, I find myself waltzing into the Toddlers Christmas party, belly hanging over the belt of my Santa outfit, merrily crying out "Ho ho ho, I'm Mary Christmas!" The parents all laughed, the children looked confused. Where was the man with the big white beard? I then launched into a long-winded explanation about how my husband, Father Christmas, was very busy in the workshop with the elves at the moment and so he'd asked me to come along on his behalf. Not quite the strike for feminism with which the whole idea began. Nevertheless, I took my role very seriously and assumed the over-enthusiastic, smiling guise of a children's entertainer, promising a fun morning of singing and presents to go along with the sugary snacks. Becoming increasingly confident, after we sang Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer I ad-libbed, swerving off into a story about how Rudloph, too, was busy resting in his stable at the moment, preparing for his big night on Christmas Eve. Why had I never done this before, I'm a natural!

Fortunately, none of the children cried and once I'd remembered that it is obligatory to have your photo taken with Father Christmas - and so, too, with Mary Christmas it seems - I dutifully re-attached my jolly smile and posed with a whole swarm of bewildered small children. I was, I am assured, the best 'Father Christmas' they've ever had. Apparently the man with a beard thing doesn't usually go down well with small children, who have been warned to stay away from strange men, and in any case they usually just turn up, say Ho Ho Ho and leave. My stories and songs were a winner. Take that feminism!

In other news, but still along the 'look how great I am' train of thought, I have had my second sewing machine adventure. Keen to install some kind of curtains in the baby's room, but without any curtain pole or curtain-holding fixture, I came up with the rather ingenious (if I do say so myself) solution of using velcro strips to attach some homemade curtains to the windows. When I say curtains, I really mean two sheets of fabric sewn together, but nevertheless I'm quite chuffed with the result. Even more so, because I didn't buy any new material for them - I happened to have precisely the correct amount of material left over from my aforementioned failed cushion cover (see the bunting blog) to fit the windows, with even a little spare to make a couple of ties.

As baby preparations go, making curtains should be quite low on the list of priorities and hardly counts as one of the essentials, but it makes a welcome distraction from the actual decision-making priorities. Such as, what to call the baby if it turns out to be a boy. At the moment, we don't have a name for it. We've read the book twice and there are officially no boys names out there that we both like. Andy suggests we adopt a numbering system, starting with Zero, because, quote, "in C-like programming languages, array indexing starts at zero and this means blah blah......" Something or other about neat sequencing...

We may not have a name for it, but we do now know what happens during the birth. We've now had 3 of our 5 antenatal classes and the very calm lady who refuses to answer our incessant questions about how much pain there is with "none at all really, it's a walk in the park", tells us that "you should enjoy the contractions, just go with it". She has also shown us a knitted womb and doll baby complete with a knitted umbilical cord, played us some tranquil 'hypnobirthing' CDs and asked us to write down our perceptions of what it means to have a baby. I wrote: "A big adventure!" Andy wrote: "Poo. Milk. Vomit."

The Escalade: fire, muskets, drums and one live chicken

We can hardly say we are living on the other side of the world, being barely 1,000 miles away from our home in Penicuik, but there are a few strange customs over here. There is no mowing your lawn between midday and 2pm Monday-Saturday, and only between 10am and midday on a Sunday - they are quite particular about their 12-2 lunch 'hour' and don't want anyone spoiling it with some noisy grass-cutting. If you are visiting a French family for dinner, you should take chocolates for the children but certainly not a bottle of wine for the adults: this would undermine their own choice of wine for the meal they have prepared. And once a year, the patisseries of  Geneva are filled with chocolate cauldrons containing marzipan leeks and cauliflowers, which are smashed open by the youngest and the oldest at the Fêtes de l'escalade.

The Escalade commemorates a rather strange moment in Genevan history when, on a cold December night in 1602, the Duke of Savoy sent troops into Geneva in an attempt to take over the city, but was defeated by Catherine Cheynel. The mother of 14 children and the wife of Pierre Royaume, she poured a giant cauldron of hot vegetable soup on the attackers and subsequently saved the city. It's their own version of Bonfire Night, I suppose, albeit with a bit more soup.

The festival takes place in Geneva over two weekends in December, starting with a big run through the city on the first weekend, complete with ridiculous costumes, and culminating with a big torch-lit parade in traditional 1600s garb on the Sunday evening of the second weekend, with a whole host of other activities taking place in between. We didn't see any of the run, although Andy reported back about eight physicists from CERN who had come second in the costume competition: two of them dressed as protons, and ran around in circles before bumping into each other - at which point, a person dressed as a Higgs appeared, before decaying into a Z and a Z-star, which then decayed into four muons... I'm not entirely sure the general public would have got the joke.

However, we headed into town on the final Sunday to see what all the fuss was about with the parade. Crammed into the old town square along with hundreds of other onlookers, many of whom were carrying pretty paper lanterns, we stood shivering alongside the stalls selling marron glacés and the carts wheeling along huge barrels of vin chaud to witness the spectacle, due to start at 5pm. Unusually, the Swiss were not on time. At around 5.30pm we heard a troop of around 20 piccolos (yes, really) tweeting out a traditional reformation-era tune, accompanied by a band of drums and thus began a long line of people kitted out in (not very warm-looking) capes, bonnets, breeches and 1600s military uniforms. There followed: several groups of mounted guards, a cart wheeling a collection of antique pieces of armour, a whole host of men carrying what can only be described as fire on the end of a stick, more men carrying muskets and lit fuses (!) a donkey with a step-ladder on its back, half a dozen sheep, a lady with a live chicken under her arm... and more piccolos. At one point a man said something loud in French, people cheered and then started singing what sounded like the French version of God Save the Queen. We didn't know the words, so we sang God Save the Queen for good measure. Presumably someone somewhere was smashing the giant cauldron (the marmite - interesting to note how our favourite yeast extract got its name, even though the French don't eat it) and the song was in praise of the soup lady.

The old town square as darkness began to fall

On the way back through the town, via an impromptu stop-off for dinner at Chez ma cousine, where they serve the very best spit-roasted chicken you have ever tasted (and the restaurant's imaginitive tagline translates as 'we eat chicken here'), we came upon these beautiful giant wire bird sculptures in the trees.

Unfortunately, it was virtually impossible to get decent photos of the parade in the darkness, so instead, I'll give you some nice photos of the snow that has been falling, deep and crisp and even, over the last week. Thanks to the volume of snow, the ski lifts here have opened two weeks early and on Saturday Andy went up to Crozet (about 20 minutes from our house) and had some of the best skiing he has had in years. I, meanwhile, drank chocolat chaud and did some knitting. On Sunday, before heading into town for the Escalade, we had a walk around our pretty village in the crisp winter sunshine, reminding ourselves how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place.

The view out to where the Rhone cuts through the Saleve and the Jura at Bellegarde.

Peron from the hillside

Slight panic, upon realising the snow is a lot deeper than I thought...

Let it snow... but not until we've got our snow tyres

It seemed this morning as if we had woken up in a ski resort. Looking out the window I could see wooden chalets and big fir trees laden with crisp, white snow and beautiful flakes still falling softly to the ground. Fetch me my skis, I'm off to the piste! Except, well, I'm forbidden from skiing at the moment and we don't live in a ski resort: true, you could probably ski down our hillside to the main road, whizzing through a few people's gardens on the way, but there's no chairlift to bring you back up again and there's no stop-off for vin chaud. 

To be honest, we were caught out. And we've been kicking ourselves today for not being more prepared. We had a sprinkling of snow at the weekend, which was pretty but disappeared almost as soon as it arrived, but the forecast for the week promised snow, snow and more snow. So on Monday morning we quickly made enquiries about getting snow tyres fitted on our C-Max. Unfortunately, it has R17 wheels, and secondhand snow tyres in this size are hard to come by, as well as being more expensive than your average R15s, so we were forced to visit a dealer. Our local garage quoted us 750 EUR for the four tyres and installation. We had little choice but to accept, but we would have to wait until at least Wednesday to get them.

Annoyingly, the BBC Weather forecast was spot on, as it so often is, about the snow. On Monday afternoon I headed off for my knitting group in some light sleet, knowing that the BBC had warned there would be snow at 3pm and that I would need to keep an eye on the weather situation. Sure enough, 3pm arrived and so did the snow. I made a hasty exit from the knitting group and hoped to get home before the snow settled, but even on the short 2-mile journey back along the main road, it was already causing the car to slip when I braked. With my mum's voice in the back of my mind ("Driving in the snow at 7 months pregnant! What were you thinking?!") I inched carefully back to our village, but had to ditch the car halfway up the village as the car simply couldn't handle the steep hill. As luck would (not) have it, Andy is doing control room shifts at CERN this week (meaning he gets to press the big red button that starts the LHC - more or less), so he needed picking up from CERN at 11pm, some 9 miles away... Fortunately, the snow turned to rain over the course of the evening, and since the car was already at the bottom of the village where the roads are more regularly travelled, I was able to get out to collect him safely.

But this morning was a different story. I had an appointment at the hospital at 8.30am, and I knew the snow was due to fall heavily overnight. Even with the car left at the bottom of the village near the main road, it was clear when we looked out the window at 7am that the snow was too deep for me to risk driving (mum's voice again sounding in my ear). With no public transport to make use of, and much to Andy's disgruntlement, we had to call a taxi. It got me to my appointment ok, but the cost for the 13-mile journey was as much as my recent train ticket from Edinburgh to London: approximately £70. Ouch.

Meanwhile, Andy headed off to CERN with a sleeping bag, prepared for the fact that I wouldn't be able to collect him after his shift at 11pm, and that he'd be spending a night on the sofa in the control room. When I finally made it home (a long walk and a bus journey later) at 1pm there was a message on the answerphone from the garage: our snow tyres were ready for fitting. And not a moment too soon. As I look outside now at the deepening snow, feeling festive with the Christmas lights twinkling in the background, I remember that the BBC forecast promises snow for the rest of the week, and I know that the 750 EUR will be worth it.

The garden turns white