Leaf raking and pie making

The other day I helped Mom rake leaves in the yard. We have two large maples out in the front, which means we get glorious color (most years) for a couple of weeks, but we also get enormous piles of leaves all over the yard. I'll be the first to admit we haven't got the nicest lawn in the neighborhood (partly due to the delightful deep shade provided by the maples and partly due to the rambunctiousness of the dog), but apparently a deep carpet of crunchy leaves isn't an acceptable alternative. Hence: raking.

It was an enjoyable twenty minutes or so, but also strange. It seemed like such an outlandish thing to do. Raking leaves? Sure, and afterwards, maybe I can whitewash a fence. Then I remembered that I haven't been home in the fall for five years. I skipped off to college in the fall of 2002 and I haven't raked a leaf since. The extremely competent and cordial facman staff did that at Grinnell, with all their noisy leaf blowers, and there weren't any leaves to rake in India. As for the one tree in the courtyard of our maison blanche, it didn't drop that many leaves, and if it did, there were janitors at the lycée to take care of that sort of thing.

Leaf raking is only one of the fall traditions I've skipped over the last while. It's kind of strange to think that I haven't spent a Thanksgiving or a Christmas at home in the last two years. Sure, we cobbled together a pumpkin pie in Madurai (and had to call the servants because we couldn't figure out how to turn on the rickety oven), and I made a prodigious pile of mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce in Cambrai, but now I'll be in a country where it's actually possible to purchase and roast a turkey yourself for a reasonable price and investiture of effort. Strange. And Christmas decorations aren't going up yet like they did in Northern France, but I know that the day after Thanksgiving, I won't be able to turn a corner without running into tinsel and carols. Or will I? Stores are definitely barreling toward the season; it was hard to find flannel sheets without Christmas ornaments on them. Soon, the notion of a Christmas that comes but once a year will be slightly laughable, since it'll be a three month process. The "So's Christmas" comeback to a slowpoke insisting on their imminent arrival is already rather dated.

I feel a little out of touch with American customs, even though I've put the effort into recreating my interpretation of them the last two years. Thanksgiving especially is a concept that doesn't really translate well. "It's like Christmas, without all the religious parts, just the togetherness," I tried to tell my French students, who stared at me blankly. But then again, they live in a country which is extremely Catholic: even if the French people are mostly non-practicing or non-Christian, all of the holidays are modeled around the Catholic calendar, and the shops close on Sundays. By contrast, America is a country where the people are devout, but the holidays try to be secular (except Christmas. And Easter. But you can't tell me Lincoln's birthday and Labor Day and Halloween are because of God).

Now that I'm back in the States for the holiday season, maybe I'll try to bring a little foreign flavor back with me. Curry the green beans at Thanksgiving, perhaps, or learn to make the gaufres so popular in the Christmas markets in northern France (Liègeoises, of course: I love the way the sugar crunches, and the Franglais in this recipe is charmingly incomprehensible). I've spent the past couple of years adapting to new rituals; it's odd to be in a place where everything is so familiar. I keep expecting saris or firecrackers or a Ferris wheel in the middle of town next to a mulled wine stand. Fortunately, America's pretty easy going about enveloping new rituals from other places into its existing celebrations. Maybe it's our history of colonizing and having been colonized. Maybe it's our immigrant populations and our cultural gluttony. I have to admit, it works for me.

And oh, Father Christmas, if you love me at all, send me a package of those chocolate-topped gaufres so easy to find in Cambrai or Lille (or in the giant vending machine in Paris Nord), but impossible to get in small-city Upper South U.S.