My true love gave to me…. oh, wait, no. That’s Christmas. I’m so confused! A menorah on my Thanksgiving table! Ma zeh? Which is Hebrew for c’est quoi, ça? Which is Mr French’s way of saying, “What the hell is going on?” All this bi-culturalism can make life confusing at times! Tonight well be having guests who grew up in Columbia, Haiti, the US and France. Some of them in several of those places !!! Some  have a hard time with English while others know French.

And now there is the great latka debate. Em would not hear of it. She waits all year for Mom’s Thanksgiving mashed potatoes with a pound of butter and gallon of crème fraîche. Truth be told, I didn’t fight her on it. I love the potato galettes I can get pre-made at the Sunday market on boul Raspail. They’re delicious, even better as I savor all the greasy kitchen duty I’m dodging. So just a menorah in our home tonight, folks.

Last year I launched an Advent calendar with 25 holiday gift ideas. 25 is a lot of presents, especially when you’re also running around town buying Hanukkah AND Christmas gifts for everyone in your life. So this year, I’m going back to my roots and giving Perfectly Parisian Present ideas for the holidays.

Starting, of course, with my personal favorite a donation in honor of someone to, Medecins sans frontières Did you know they were founded in Paris? With such a supportive social welfare system, the French do not have a lot of charitable organizations, but local doctors started MSF during the Biafra crisis and they have become national heros, as well Nobel Prize winners for putting their lives in danger as they fly across disaster areas and war zones to help others, regardless of their religion, politics or history. People saving people. Who knows? It may be the first step towards world peace!

Happy Thanksgiving every one! Gobble, gobble.

That’s is what I was desperately searching for yesterday afternoon. Sounds like a Parisienne’s secret beauty treatment, similar to une brésilienne, which often  leaves women in tears on the esthetician’s table. It’s not. It’s a simple stretch of fabric sold in swaths of 6 yards.

Despite their exotic name, African waxes are traditionally made in Holland, where weavers use wax to create the pattern, very much like a batik. The fabrics are dyed in bright colors with exotic prints, featuring chickens, geese, and Gucci handbags. They are then shipped to African countries where women take the 1.5m x 5.5m rectangles and transform them into bright, cheerful dresses, usually with a matching head scarf/hat that they twist into fabulous forms with stunning dexterity.

When I went to Africa 20 years ago, I bought myself a lovely wax and it has been our Thanksgiving table cloth ever since. 25 years of grease stains and red wine incidents have taken their toll. A few years ago I trimmed off a 1 meter bit to serve as butterfly wings for a Halloween costume, and last year was the proverbial straw for my poor camel when we purchased a new dining table that is simple too wide for my scrap of fabric.

When I explained to Mr French that I’d be spending an entire lunch hour looking for a new table cloth, he was somewhat dismayed. We’ve got a beautiful Jacquard and a stunning Basque cloth. What did African prints have to do with pilgrims and American Indians, any way. I couldn’t come up with a logical explanation, because it’s not logical. I need my cloth.

Chateau Rouge metro station is known for the many boutiques that serve the local African community that lives in the Goutte d’Or neighborhood. I love that the poorer part of town, just behind the Tati store, is the “Drop of Gold” area. Even today, the streets are spotted with jewelry stores selling gold by the weight.

It was only as I was on the escalator getting out of the metro that I realized I may have done something stupid. I had no address, no particular name of a shop, just the knowledge that this was the place to head. I looked up the street. No waxes. I looked down. Just more luggage stores and gold shops. I decided to cross the road and head up a side street, where I found one African hair store after the other. There may have been 20 of them on one small block. The only other commerce was shop with phone cabins for overseas calls, and an Asian lady trying to sell gold watches to passers by.

At the corner, I turned left, crossing back to the metro and heading up another side street. A Kosher restaurant, a Hallal butcher and more African hair salons, with a bakery on the corner. I stopped to take a photo of the flat, round breads in the window, marveling a the fact that immigrants to this neighborhood may not even know what a baguette is, when a man bumped into me. I looked up and saw that he was blind. I explained where were and where were headed, as I guided him to the bakery door. He replied, “Oh, here it is, I see, I see.”

Leaving him inside the warm bakery with their friendly staff, I turned the corner et voilà African Wax was beaming in bright red letters on a yellow sign. I walked in and was astonished by the prices: 62€ for 6 yards. I started looking around, and found the 47€ batches. The colors were bright and tropical, and it was hard to resist. I headed out the door, in search of more. The next shop was full of Africans, eating, joking and trying to sell their goods to the owner. Like Goldilocks, it took a third try to find the place that was just right for me. 10€ bolts in a vivid aqua with mustards and burnt oranges. In the corner of the shop, an imam was blessing a woman.

I joked with the salesman that I was in Paris, buying Dutch fabric, designed for Africans, being sold by a Tunisian for an American holiday.

There was recently an article in the New York Times declaring hipsters had ruined Paris. It has created quite a stir over here and people have approached me about it all week. Like many, the article made me angry. Not because the “journalist” was bashing hipsters, name calling is an art of playgrounds, I rather like that it denounced the author as a fool immediately.

What made me angry was that a serious paper like the New York Times was promoting such dribble. Where were the fact checkers? The editors? If you substitute the word (insert nationality here) for the word Hipster in the piece, it would have been thrown out as hateful slop. And is the NYTimes really implying that a handful of 20 somethings could do what the Romans, British and Hitler could not? Are the French really so simple and child-like that they don’t know what’s good for them? Because lets be clear about this. The French are thrilled with the gentrification. The author was too, when he chose to live in a neighborhood that has been gentrifying since most hipsters were still in diapers and was called SoPi when I moved here over a decade ago.

The cocktail bars he laments are filled with affluent young FRENCH people who order burrata, sample kale and would probably be thrilled to find steel cut oats. These are smart, educated kids who had to study philosophy and “general culture” to get their high school diplomas. Most of them have a passport and travel the world exploring all kinds of different cultures, American included. They know what they want in their lives and they’re dead on with the cocktails. Until very recently getting a decent cocktail in Paris was an exercise in frustration and now its an absolute delight!

The French have been managing this city with more or less success for millennia, they don’t need the NY Times, or some pedantic American who has been in town for 24 months telling them what is good for their city and what’s ruining it.

Skimming along the NYTimes a few days later, I got even angrier because you see all the more important stuff going on in the world and you ask yourself… who cares??? Thousands are dead, homeless and missing loved ones in the Philippines. Entire families have been wiped out. 10s of 1000s have been displaced. That’s a tragedy. And it is thanks to the very same NYTimes that I looked to for ideas on how I could help. They suggested giving to Doctors without Borders, who is over there on the ground and doing what they can. I have been a big fan of Doctors without Borders ever since I backpacked through East Africa 20 years ago. They make a difference in people’s lives. They’ll even help hipsters! I blogged about them last year suggesting a donation to them would make a great holiday gift and this year I agreed to run the Semi Marathon de Paris on their behalf. They are in the Philippines doing what they can and I am here in Paris doing what I can, which is to ask for your support. Its easy, simply click on the link below. They suggested a minimum donation of 20€, but even 5€ makes a difference. Already through Facebook and Twitter you have been a fantastic crowd, helping me raise 285€, well past the 100€ they asked of me. But goals are meant to be surpassed, so don’t be shy. Merci!

http://www.alvarum.com/sylviasabes

I would not be the least surprised if someone comments telling me that this is not the first time I’ve used this titled. Like the great author Virginia Woolf, I am obsessed with needing a room of my own. A space of my own, where I can work and concentrate and get things done.

Mr French does not understand this. When I suggested that we should perhaps invest in a chambre de bonne so that I could have a place to write, he was literally aghast. It is the first time I have ever seen the facial expression “aghast” so it made an impression on me. A mix between shock, horrified and absolutely confused. It took me a while to understand that we were having a cultural difference. For Mr French, a dynamic young woman like myself requesting a room of her own is the Parisian equivalent of suburban housewife suggesting that you hire the hot new pool cleaner the Johnson’s down the street are using. It is a sign that Madame is looking for adventure.

I tried to explain that I find it impossible to work when I know there is dirty laundry piling up on the other side of the wall. It is easier just to throw it in the machine, which rumbles for hours, then beeps, demanding to be fed again. The cat wants out every hour, the post lady rings, the concierge buzzes, then Em comes home and my attention is required elsewhere. Mr French didn’t hear all that. He reminded me that I had spent months searching for a flat because I had insisted the living room be off the street. I needed quiet to work from home. And that the beautiful bookcase in our living room has a built-in desk so that I could work from home. He was hurt, confused and a little concerned, so I dropped the topic.

But I am obsessed and don’t give up easily. I thought shared work space would be a fair compromise. I found a couple of options, but they were all either too loud, too far, or unheated. Like Goldilocks testing the porridge, I was waiting to find something that was just right.

Monday morning my phone vibrated. A good friend was calling. A single Mom with two grown daughters who live abroad. Work was asking her to go to New Caledonia for a month. She has been working towards this position for years and needs a break from Paris. I was thrilled for her. But that was not why she was calling. She was looking for a cat sitter and thought of my quest for a room. Would I be willing to feed her cat for a month in exchange for a room of my own. An airy, light flooded apartment, more precisely, just a few blocks away from my home. She didn’t have to ask twice.

When I awoke this morning the sky was a vivid winter blue, the sun shone brightly and cast a gorgeous light over the city, making my heart smile as I headed out the door to a room of my own.

This post is what the French call and Hors Sujet. It has nothing to do with Paris and it is uninterestingly personal. Consider yourself warned.

When I was a young bride in Montréal, I met this incredible woman, Anne-Marie. The instant I met her, I wanted to be her. She was beautiful, charming and oh-so-elegant. Her home was charming, she’d lived in Africa; she and her husband went to balls and belonged to the fine art museum and were simply perfect.

AM and I became fast friends. We’d go on road trips together, sometimes with our husbands, sometimes without. We explored the East Coast, California, and once, with 4 very young children thrown into the back of a truck, the small villages of Hungary. When my husband du jour and I moved to Northern California she and her husband pour la vie moved to Southern California. Then we moved to Paris and they moved to Nevada; we divorced, they moved to Chicago. Our lives have been an adventure.

One of the things that AM and I shared was our belief in Creative Visualization. There is a book with the same title and it was our bible at the time. Basically, we believed that to live the life you dreamed, you had to dream it. It was that simple. Dream yourself into a gorgeous Bordeaux château, and it would happen. Yes, we were young and naïve. LIfe is not that easy, it interferes more than one ever imagined, throwing financial crises, illness and heart break across everyone’s path. And our dreams were incredibly silly. Once you’ve lived a week in a château, you realize that it takes 20 minutes just to open the shutters each morning… its a LOT OF WORK. But we had our dreams and we both dreamed large.

AM’s dream was to have a boutique that supported local artists and artisans. Well, its not a shop, but 20 years later she has a very successful website that does just that and more as she supports and inspires women. Amazingly, despite the geography that separates us, I can say “I was there” when inspiration struck and AM came up with the name “The Succulent Wife“.

One year for the holidays my husband du jour gave me a “dream” journal; it encouraged you to define your dream job, your dream vacation, your dream day.

This morning, as I completed my second lap around the Luxembourg Gardens, that journal and the dream day filtered through my thoughts. In my dream day I had breakfast with my girls, went to yoga class and came home to run my photography studio before preparing the (organic!) evening meal for a dinner at home with the family. I wrote that 15 years ago. This morning I breakfasted with M, went for a run and came home to spend the day writing. Tonight we’ll be having a lovely home cooked butternut squash soup. The painting has changed a bit; E has moved away, I now run instead hit the mat, writing supplanted photography and my ‘family’ has changed more than I ever imagined possible. But the framework: its all there and its wonderful and terrifying at the same time.

Of course, I was a dreamer, so I forgot some of the important stuff. Like earning enough to make a good living, having a room of my own and finding time to give back to the community (as for the health and well-being of my loved ones, remember, I’m a Jewish mother, you don’t write that kind of stuff down…it will attract the evil eye (ach, ach, poo, poo) and anyway, you’re saying it in your mind with every exhale you breathe!).

I am off now, to buy myself another dream journal and fill in the gaps for the next 20 years and a warning for you all to be very, very careful what you wish for!