Christmas Countdown Calendar Day 14

Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships

December 14, 2025 – 11 days to Christmas

Today’s Story:

Margaux stood in Henri’s farmhouse kitchen at 4:47 AM on December 24rd, drinking coffee that could strip paint and wondering why she’d agreed to this.

“Remind me,” she said, “why I’m awake at an hour that shouldn’t exist, preparing to go to a marché aux gras?”

Henri, who looked distressingly awake for someone sixty-five years old, handed her a thermos. “Because you’ve spent six months alone in your apartment trolling everyone with an opinion on the internet, and I decided it was my civic duty to intervene before you became completely insufferable.”

“I’m already completely insufferable. It’s who I am.”

“Mais non. You are a ‘brilliant journalist who’s temporarily lost her mojo’.” He pulled on a worn jacket. “The market starts at six. Let’s go and watch them set it up.”

Margaux had known Henri for thirty-five years. They’d covered wars, corruption scandals, and environmental disasters together; they reported fearlessly all the ways humans found to destroy each other. Then Henri had retired, bought a farm, started raising ducks ethically (a phrase Margaux found oxymoronic), and apparently decided that dragging his cynical former colleague to a foie gras market at dawn was going to give her a new zest for life. (???)

She got in his Deux Chevaux. The Gers countryside was pitch black, silent except for their engine rattling and the occasional bark of a farm dog. Winter fog hung low, making everything look like a badly exposed photograph.

“This is going to be depressing,” Margaux said. “Industrial animal agriculture, rural economic collapse, traditional farming methods disappearing—”

“Or,” Henri interrupted, “it’s going to be a lively farmers’ market, days before Christmas. With farmers proudly selling their produce. You should try observing before editorialising.”

“Observing IS editorialising. Everything’s a story with an angle.”

Henri did not reply, he was manoeuvring the Citroen into a minuscule parking spot on a point rond.

The Marché au Gras in Samatan was not what Margaux expected.

She’d expected corporate stands, industrial farming, the sanitised brutality of modern food production.

She found hundreds of small farmers setting up individual stalls in the pre-dawn dark, the intoxicating aroma of freshly brewed coffee and vin chaud, in deference to the season, a market that had apparently run every Monday from November to March since the Middle Ages, uninterrupted by wars, revolutions, and the general collapse of rural France.

“This is it,” Henri said. “Biggest foie gras market in France. Two hundred producers, all small-scale, all local. Most of them I know personally.”

They walked through the setup. Farmers arranging their products with the precision of people who’d done this weekly for decades: whole ducks and geese, foie gras (raw, mi-cuit, stuffed), confit, rillettes, eggs, and a large selection of vegetables from winter potagers. Everything displayed in metal basins or wicker baskets, no plastic, no corporate branding, just food and the people who’d produced it.

“Sacré Henri!” A woman roughly Henri’s age embraced him, then looked at Margaux with the assessing gaze of someone who could judge character at twenty paces. “This is the journalist? The famous one?”

“Former journalist,” Margaux corrected. “Retired. Inactive.”

“Bah. Once a journalist, always nosy.” The woman—Claudette, apparently—gestured at her stall. “You want to learn about foie gras? Real foie gras, not the industrial garbage? I’ll teach you.”

Before Margaux could protest, she really did not want to have anything to do with foie gras, Claudette was explaining: the ducks (prize Mulards, or crossbreeds), the feeding (gavage, controversial, but done traditionally—hand-feeding twice daily, birds living outdoors), the liver itself (colour, texture, marbling, how to identify quality).

“People say it’s cruel,” Claudette said bluntly. “City people who’ve never seen a duck. These birds—” She gestured at photos of her farm. “They run to me at feeding time. They’re not afraid. Industrial farming is cruel. This? This is tradition. The birds live good lives. More respect than humans give each other.”

Margaux found herself asking questions, her journalist’s instinct impossible to suppress. About economics (tight, but sustainable), about regulations (onerous, but necessary), about why Claudette did this when she could make more money doing literally anything else.

“Because my grandfather did it. My father did it. The land is ours. The knowledge is ours. If we stop, it dies.” Claudette shrugged. “Also, the ducks need someone who gives a shit. Might as well be me.”

The market opened at six. Instant chaos: buyers flowing in, farmers calling out prices, rapid-fire negotiations in French and Occitan, the particular energy of commerce that’s been happening in the same place for six centuries.

Henri moved through it like he belonged—greeting farmers, inspecting products, negotiating prices with the practised ease of someone who understood both quality and value. Margaux followed, notebook appearing in her hand without conscious decision, journalist brain engaging despite her much-maligned retirement.

She watched an old farmer, had to be eighty at least, selling foie gras he’d clearly prepared himself, hands shaking slightly as he wrapped each purchase in paper, refusing to raise his prices even though his product was clearly superior to his neighbours’.

She watched a young couple, not yet thirty, hesitantly buying what must be their first Christmas foie gras, the vendor explaining, at length and in detail, the various preparation methods, with the patience of someone teaching something that mattered to him.

She watched Henri negotiate for a foie gras with a woman named Thérèse, both of them laughing about something, their transaction more conversation than commerce, twenty minutes of discussion ending with a handshake and Henri paying slightly more than asked because “it’s Christmas and your grandson needs braces.”

“You overpaid,” Margaux said when they moved on.

“I paid what it was worth. There’s a difference.”

By eight AM, they’d bought: one exceptional foie gras (Thérèse’s), two confits de canard, fresh eggs, walnuts from someone’s orchard, wine from a neighbour’s vineyard, and vegetables from Claudette’s winter garden.

“This is for tonight,” Henri explained. “Réveillon. Christmas Eve dinner. Traditional. That you’re cooking with me.”

“I don’t cook—”

“You observe and criticise. Same skill set, different application.”

Later that evening, Henri’s kitchen smelled like duck fat and Armagnac. They’d spent the afternoon preparing: the foie gras seared quickly, perfectly, served with toasted bread and fig jam Henri had made in September. The confit cooked slowly in its own fat, skin crisping, meat falling off the bone. Potatoes roasted in duck fat with garlic and thyme.

Simple food. Prepared with great care. Nothing industrial, nothing corporate, just ingredients treated with respect by people who cooked with love.

“You’ve been quiet,” Henri said, pouring wine—the neighbour’s Côtes de Gascogne, rough but honest.

“I’m processing.”

“Process out loud. You’re a journalist. Report.”

Margaux stared at her wine. “I spent thirty years documenting how terrible people are. Corruption, violence, environmental destruction, all the ways we’re destroying everything I care about. I got good at it. Won awards. Then I retired.”

“And?”

“This morning, I just watched two hundred farmers wake up at 4 AM to sell food they produced themselves, in a market that’s run for more than six hundred years, in a rural area that everyone says is dying, and it’s not dying—their story is just very different from the story I expected.” She took another sip. “It’s not all moonshine and roses. Half of those farmers are seriously struggling. The economics are brutal. Traditional farming is being crushed by industrial agriculture.”

“But?”

“But they’re still there. Still doing it. Thérèse is raising ducks the way her grandmother did. Claudette could sell to corporations for twice the money, but won’t because it would compromise quality. That old man of eighty is still showing up every Monday.” She looked at Henri. “You could have stayed in journalism. Covered more wars, won more awards. Instead, you’re raising ducks and paying extra for foie gras because someone’s grandson needs braces.”

“Your point?”

“My point is I forgot that we are also capable of this, of doing things because they’re worth doing even when they’re hard. And controversial.” She gestured at the food, the kitchen, the farm outside. “I’ve been so focused on documenting darkness that I forgot to look for light. And then you dragged me to a duck market at 4 AM and forced me to see it.”

Henri smiled. “The world is full of darkness. You know that better than most. But it’s also full of farmers who care about their ducks, markets that run for centuries, and people who overpay for foie gras because community matters. Both things are true. You just forgot to look for the other part.”

They ate slowly, carefully, the food tasting like history and the particular satisfaction of knowing exactly where it came from. Outside, Christmas Eve settled over the Gers—cold, clear, stars sparkling in the vast night sky.

“Thank you,” Margaux said finally. “For not letting me disappear into cynicism.”

“De rien. That’s what friends do. Also, you’re coming back for the January market. Claudette wants to introduce you to her nephew. He’s single, runs an organic vegetable farm, and apparently needs someone to argue with.”

“I’m sixty-two and retired—”

“So is he. Perfect match. Also, you should write about this.”

“Henri, I’m retired—”

Margaux looked at her notebook, at the pages of observations she’d accumulated without meaning to. At the story forming in her head: the market, the farmers, the six centuries of tradition continuing despite everything.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe one more story.”

The Making of Friends and Maintaining of Friendships Master Plan

During challenging times, friends often serve as our guiding lights. They may not have all the answers, but their presence helps us find our way. This holiday season, take a moment to honour the friends who’ve been a source of light in your life.

Think about the friend who calls just to check in, the one who sends a random text that makes you smile, or the person who’s always willing to listen. These acts, no matter how small, are profound reminders that you are not alone.

Friendships are about mutual illumination. Just as your friends light your path, you have the power to brighten theirs. Even if life feels uncertain right now, trust that the light you share will always be enough.

Today, reach out to a friend who’s found meaning in simple, honest work. Go to the market, the farm, the place where people are doing something real with their hands. Observe without editorialising. Let yourself see both the struggle and the passion.

Worst case scenario: You wake up at 4 AM, feel awkward around strangers, and confirm that the world is as depraved and depressing as it’s always been.

Best case scenario: Your former colleague, who left journalism to raise ducks, drags you to a six-hundred-year-old foie gras market where two hundred small farmers prove that tradition, passion and honest work still exist despite industrial agriculture trying to crush them. You remember why you became a journalist—not to document darkness exclusively, but to tell true stories about both darkness and light. You accidentally take notes, meet farmers who care more about quality than profit, and watch your friend overpay for foie gras because their community matters to them. You end up writing one more story, maybe dating an organic vegetable farmer, definitely returning to the January market, because your friend reminded you that the world contains both corruption and duck farmers who hand-feed their birds, and both deserve documentation, and maybe the second story is actually more important because everyone already knows about the darkness but someone needs to remind people about the light.

Who has been a source of light in your life this year? How can you express your gratitude to them this holiday season?

Newsletter Subscription

I’m still collecting subscriptions to my news letter with these post, so if you haven’t subscribed already and would you like to find out what type of friend you are, how well you know your friends or if you and a new friend really are compatible, subscribe my filling in your email address in the box below and I’ll send you a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions to help you do just that. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. You can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time. Included:

–How well do you know your Friends? Quiz
– What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz
– 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and
– 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend

Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox!

I’ve lost count of the number of guests who have asked for the recipes of the dishes I serve during my retreats. I’ve finally gotten around to publishing my retreat recipe collection as an e-book. If you’re interested in nutrition, especially while you’re walking the Camino de Santiago, or you just love authentic French cuisine, here is a link to my ebook The Walking Gourmet: Essential Food Strategies for the French Camino de Santiago

Designed for those navigating a life transition, the Radical Renaissance Protocol guides you through an identity reset, helping you reconnect with your purpose, realign your values, and reclaim the clarity you thought you’d lost. This isn’t about fixing what’s broken: through reflection, strategic reinvention, and soul-anchored mentoring, you’ll transform uncertainty into direction and dormant potential into meaningful impact.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Crossroads Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.

I put the essence of who I am, and everything I have experienced that makes me who I am, with great enthusiasm, into my retreats, courses and books. – Dr Margaretha Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract (cert,) Transformational Life Coach (dip,) Life Story Coach (cert) Counselling (cert,) Med Hypnotherapy (dip) and EAGALA (cert)

13/12/202514/12/2025

Countdown to Christmas Calendar Day 13

Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships during Life Transitions

December 13, 2025 – 12 days to Christmas

Today’s Story: The Sorano Revival

For Sue T.

Sophia had been standing in front of the Christmas ornament stall at the Bordeaux Christmas market for seventeen minutes, staring at a glass angel with such intensity that the vendor was starting to look concerned.

She wasn’t actually seeing the angel. She was seeing her house in Caudéran: three floors of honey-colored stone, four bedrooms, a kitchen that still smelled faintly of the cinnamon rolls she’d made every December morning for eighteen years. Decorated to within an inch of its life because that’s what you did when you had children. Except she didn’t have children anymore. She had two university students who’d sent exactly three texts between them since September: “arrived safe,” “need money,” and “staying with friends for Xmas hope thats ok?”

It was not, in fact, okay.

The angel’s wings caught the light from the market stalls, sending little prisms across the cobblestones. Around her, Bordeaux was doing what Bordeaux does best in December: being effortlessly, infuriatingly beautiful. The Place Pey-Berland glowed with thousands of lights. The smell of vin chaud and roasting chestnuts and pain d’épices hung seductively in the cold air. Children shrieked with delight on the carousel. Couples held mittened hands.

“Are you buying that or planning to propose to it?”

Sophia turned. Philippe stood there holding two steaming cups of vin chaud, wearing a scarf so aggressively festive it looked like Christmas had mugged a pride parade and stolen its wardrobe. The scarf had bells. Actual bells.

“I’m having a moment,” Sophia said.

“You’re having a breakdown in public, chérie.” He handed her the wine. “Drink this before you do something regrettable.”

The wine was perfect—hot, spiced, the kind of warm that started in your hands and worked its way to your soul. Sophia took three large sips before answering. “How did you even know I was here?”

“Because you’ve been avoiding my calls for two weeks, your house has been dark every time I drive past—yes, I’ve been checking, don’t look at me like that—and the Marché de Noël is where sad people go to pretend they’re participating in the joy of the season while slowly freezing to death.” He sipped his own wine, eyeing her over the rim. “Also, Marie-Claire at the boulangerie on rue Sainte-Catherine said you’ve been buying single croissants every morning with the energy of someone contemplating throwing themselves into the Garonne.”

“I’m not—” Sophia gestured helplessly at the market, at the cathedral, at the impossible beauty of her city at Christmas, at her entire life. “I’m just adjusting.”

“Mm. So how’s that going?”

“Terribly.”

“Thought so.” Philippe linked his arm through hers with the confidence of someone who’d known her for thirty years and had written permission—notarised—to physically remove her from public spaces when necessary. “Come. I need your help with something catastrophically ambitious and possibly illegal.”

They wound through the Vieille Ville, past shop windows full of canelés and foie gras and bottles of wine that cost more than Sophia’s car down payment. Past the cathedral, where bells were ringing for evening mass. Past the bookshop where she used to buy bedtime story books and now wouldn’t know what to do with herself.

Philippe’s apartment was near the Place de la Bourse, in one of those buildings that looked stern from the outside and impossibly elegant inside—all exposed brick and original parquet floors and the kind of tall windows that made you understand why French people are so smug about their architecture. Music sheets covered every surface. A grand piano dominated the living room, black and gleaming and clearly expensive enough that Philippe’s teaching career was going significantly better than her current lifestyle of ornament-coveting and single-croissant purchasing.

“Sit,” Philippe commanded, already rummaging through a folder thick enough to be a doctoral thesis. “I’m making an executive decision about your life.”

“That’s concerning.”

He emerged with sheet music, a bottle of Sauternes, and the expression of someone who’d had an idea so good it might actually kill him. “Flash mob. Christmas Eve. After the evening performance at the Grand Théâtre. Lobby. Sixty-voice choir, four songs in four-part harmony, complete surprise. I’m organising. You’re directing.”

Sophia actually laughed—a real laugh, the first in weeks, the kind that came from somewhere deep and forgotten. “Philippe. Mon Dieu. I don’t sing anymore—”

“You don’t sing professionally anymore. Altogether a different kettle of—what’s the expression?”

“Fish.”

He sat at the piano, running his fingers over the keys like greeting old friends. “Point stands. You’re a soprano, you’ve always been a soprano and you’ll always be a soprano.”

“My voice is gone. Twenty years of not using it—”

“Singing,” Philippe interrupted, playing a chord—middle C, pure and clear and so familiar it hurt—”is like riding a bicycle. Or making love. You don’t forget, you just get nervous about starting again.” He looked at her expectantly. “Sing.”

“No.”

“Sing or I’m calling both your children and telling them you’re having a crisis and need them to come home immediately and deal with their mother’s breakdown. I have their numbers. I will do it. I have no shame.”

“That’s blackmail—”

“That’s motivation. Different thing. Now sing.”

Sophia opened her mouth. The note came out—rusty, uncertain, not the crystalline soprano she’d once commanded, but there. Present. Real. Hers.

Philippe played another chord. She matched it. Then another. Before she knew what was happening, they were halfway through “Ave Maria”—the Schubert, not the Gounod, because Philippe had always been pretentious—and she was crying, and Philippe kept playing like this was completely normal, which it probably was because he’d accompanied her through four pregnancies, two career crises, one divorce scare, and one extremely ill-advised attempt to dye her hair burgundy in 1998.

“Your voice,” he said when they finished, not looking at her because he was too kind to watch her cry, “is fine. Not performance ready, but flash-mob ready, which is what we need.” He handed her the folder. “Sixty people. Mix of ages, experience levels. Half can’t read music. Two are actively tone-deaf but very enthusiastic, and I didn’t have the heart to turn them away. One is ninety-three. You have five days to organise them into something that won’t make the Grand Théâtre ban me for life.”

“Philippe. This is insane—”

“Yes! Exactement!” He poured them both Sauternes in glasses that looked like they cost more than the wine. “You’ve spent two months sitting in your silent house feeling sorry for yourself, eating single croissants. Time to do something absolutely ridiculous that reminds you who you were before you became a mother.”

“I don’t know who that is anymore.”

“Moi, je sais. She’s a soprano who made grown men weep with Puccini. Who whipped a cathedral choir into shape in six days when the director had appendicitis during Easter week. Who once told Conductor Bernard he was ‘musically illiterate’ in front of the entire Orchestre National because he didn’t understand the concept of pianissimo.” Philippe grinned, raising his glass. “That woman is still in there. She’s just been buried under two decades of school runs and maternal guilt and convincing yourself you were done with music. Time to excavate her, ma belle.”

Sophia looked at the sheet music. At Philippe’s ridiculously hopeful face. At the alternative, which was going home to her silent house and staring at the ceiling until New Year’s.

“D’accord,” she said. “But if this goes badly, I’m telling everyone it was your idea.”

“Chérie, it is my idea. I’m counting on the credit.”

The rehearsals were glorious, exhausting, chaotic disasters.

Philippe had recruited from everywhere: his university students, the chorus from Sciences Po, a community choir that met in a church basement near Saint-Michel, random people who’d responded to a Facebook post that said “Can you sing? Want to ambush the bourgeoisie with Christmas joy? No experience necessary, enthusiasm mandatory.”

They met in a rehearsal space near the Chartrons—sixty people ranging from eighteen to seventy-five, crammed into a room that comfortably held thirty, attempting to learn four-part harmony while wearing winter coats because the heating was “temperamental,” which was French for “broken and no one’s fixing it until January.”

Sophia had forgotten what this felt like. The particular chaos of sixty people trying to sing the same thing at the same time. The acoustic mess of untrained voices finding their range. The moment when something clicked and suddenly, miraculously, it sounded like music.

She’d forgotten how good she was at this.

“Tenors!” she called, cutting them off mid-phrase. “You’re flat. You’re singing harmony, not melody. Think of it as lurking musically. You’re the mysterious stranger at the party.”

“I can do mysterious,” said a tenor who looked about nineteen and was wearing a beret unironically.

“Then lurk as if you mean it.”

The tenors lurked. It worked.

“Basses, more depth. You’re singing from your throat. Sing from here—” She gestured at her diaphragm. “Like you’re trying to knock down a wall with sound. Like you’re arguing with your mother-in-law. Passion.”

The basses knocked. The room vibrated. Someone’s coffee cup fell over.

“Parfait. Sopranos—” She paused, looking at the twelve women attempting the high part of “Les Anges dans nos Campagnes.” They were singing beautifully. Too beautifully. “You’re doing that thing where you’re singing pretty instead of singing true. Stop singing prettily. Be powerful. Be enormous. Shatter the windows.”

“But I thought sopranos were supposed to be—”

“Supposed to be what? Delicate? Feminine? Non. You’re the bells in the cathedral tower. You’re the cry of victory. You’re not decorative.” Sophia felt something old and fierce rising in her chest. “Sing like you’re calling down the heavens. From the top. Again.”

They sang again. The sound was enormous, thrilling, the kind of sound that made the hairs on your arms stand up.

By the third rehearsal, they sounded almost competent. By the fifth, they sounded good. By Christmas Eve afternoon—their final run-through in the Grand Théâtre’s upper lobby, sneaking in while the matinee performance of Handel’s Messiah was happening downstairs—they sounded like something worth hearing.

They sounded like magic.

“Bon,” Philippe said, addressing the group. He was wearing another catastrophic scarf, this one featuring embroidered reindeer. “Tonight. Eight-thirty PM. The main performance ends at eight-fifteen. Audience exits into the lobby—it’ll be packed, champagne everywhere, very Bordeaux, very self-satisfied. We’re scattered among them. Look like normal audience members. Try not to look terrified. When Sophia gives the signal, we start. No announcement, no introduction. Just music.”

“What’s the signal?” asked the ninety-three-year-old alto, who had the best voice in the section and the posture of a duchess.

“She’ll sing the first line of ‘Minuit Chrétien.'” Philippe looked at Sophia. “Can you do that? Walk into a lobby full of strangers and just… start singing? In public? Without warning? Like an unhinged pigeon?”

Sophia thought about her silent house. About her children spending Christmas elsewhere. About twenty years of not singing because there was always something more important—dinner to make, homework to check, permission slips to sign, laundry to fold, a life that had consumed her so completely she’d forgotten she used to be someone else.

“Bien sûr,” she said. “I can do that.”

“Bon.” Philippe grinned. “Alors—scatter. Reconvene at eight-fifteen. Try not to get arrested. I haven’t budgeted for bail.”

Eight-fifteen PM, Christmas Eve.

The Grand Théâtre sparkled with lights and nineteenth-century grandeur, all gold leaf and crystal chandeliers and the particular smugness of a building that knows it’s magnificent. The performance—Handel’s Messiah, very traditional, very Bordeaux—had just ended. The lobby filled with well-dressed audience members, champagne appearing on silver trays as if by magic, conversations about the soprano’s high notes and whether the conductor had been too slow and wasn’t the alto section divine, and where were they having dinner afterwards.

Sophia stood near the centre, wearing the black dress she’d bought for her daughter’s graduation and hadn’t worn since. Around the lobby, scattered invisibly among the crowd, were sixty people trying desperately to look casual while having private panic attacks.

She caught sight of Philippe across the lobby. He was pretending to admire a painting, champagne in hand, looking like any other cultured Bordelais enjoying a night at the theatre. He caught her eye. Winked. Nodded.

Sophia took a breath. Then another. Her heart was hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears.

Twenty years. Twenty years since she’d performed. Twenty years since she’d stood in front of people and opened her mouth and trusted that something beautiful would come out.

She took one more breath.

Then she opened her mouth and sang:

“Minuit, Chrétien—”

Her voice—her real voice, the one she’d abandoned twenty years ago—rang out into the lobby. Pure, clear, effortless. The voice that had made men cry and women fall silent and conductors forgive her for calling them musically illiterate.

It was still there. It had always been there.

The crowd went silent. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. Champagne glasses froze halfway to lips.

Then the basses joined, their voices rising from different corners of the lobby like something ancient and inevitable:

“C’est l’heure solennelle—”

Then the tenors, lurking magnificently. Then the altos, then the sopranos, sixty voices filling the Grand Théâtre lobby with “O Holy Night”—Minuit Chrétien—sung in French, in four-part harmony, building from pianissimo to fortissimo until the chandelier crystals were vibrating and every person in the lobby was either crying or filming or both.

Sophia conducted with small gestures—a hand indicating dynamics, a nod for tempo, her whole body communicating joy and power and the particular transcendence of perfectly executed choral music. The soprano she’d been. The woman she’d forgotten.

They moved through the set: “Minuit Chrétien,” then “Les Anges dans nos Campagnes” with its Gloria in excelsis Deo so joyful people started laughing, then a jazz arrangement of “Petit Papa Noël” that made the audience clap along, then finally “Douce Nuit“—Silent Night—sung so softly the lobby held its collective breath, everyone leaning in, afraid to miss a single note.

The final chord faded into silence.

For one perfect moment, no one moved.

Then applause—not polite concert applause, but the real kind, the standing ovation kind, people cheering and wiping their eyes and demanding to know who they were, where they were from, whether they were professionals, whether they were touring, whether they could possibly, please, do it again.

Sophia stood in the center of it all, sixty smiling faces around her, the sound of applause echoing off marble and gold leaf, and felt something she hadn’t felt in twenty years.

She was back.

Later, past midnight, at a brasserie near the theatre—Chez Baptiste, all zinc counters and red velvet and waiters who’d seen everything—sixty people crammed around tables pushed together, drinking wine and eating oysters and dissecting the performance with the obsessive detail of musicians who’d just pulled off something miraculous.

“The tenor section was flat in the second verse—”

“We were NOT flat, the altos were sharp—”

“The tempo was perfect, non, it was parfait—”

“Did you see that woman in the front row crying? I made someone cry—”

“The acoustics in that lobby, mon Dieu—”

Philippe slid into the seat beside Sophia, holding a glass of Sauternes that definitely wasn’t from the bar. “The theatre director cornered me. Wants to talk to you about directing their community outreach choir. Also, three people asked if you teach voice lessons. One asked if we’re doing this again next year. Another asked if we’re touring. I told him yes to all of it because I make terrible decisions when I’m happy.”

Sophia laughed—the real kind, from her belly, the way she used to laugh. “I don’t know if I can—”

“You just led a flash mob choir in the Grand Théâtre lobby on Christmas Eve. You can do literally anything.” He raised his glass, and around the table, sixty people fell silent and raised theirs too. “To Sophia, who discovered that empty nests can be launching pads. À la tienne!”

Sophia’s phone buzzed. Her daughter:

MOM. You’re all over Instagram. You’re SINGING??? In the GRAND THÉÂTRE???? Why didn’t you tell us? Also Jules and I are coming home for New Year’s, we want to hear EVERYTHING.

Sophia smiled, typed back: Long story.

The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan

Traditions carry a special kind of magic. They ground us in moments of joy and connection, and when shared with friends, they become even more meaningful. Whether it’s decorating a tree, baking cookies, or watching a favourite holiday movie, traditions are the glue that keeps relationships strong through life’s changes.

If you’re going through a life transition, revisiting old traditions—or creating new ones—can bring comfort and joy. It’s also a wonderful opportunity to invite friends into your world. Shared traditions become shared memories, and those memories create bonds that last far beyond the holiday season.

When an identity loss makes you feel invisible, reach out to the friend who knew you before—and accept their ridiculous, ambitious plan to remind you who you are. Say yes to the flash mob, the project, the thing that terrifies you because it requires you to be the person you used to be before life transformed you into someone else.

Worst case scenario: You spend a week organising chaos, remember that leading is exhausting, and discover your voice isn’t quite what it was twenty years ago.

Best case scenario: Your best friend, who’s known you for thirty years, refuses to let you disappear into maternal grief and empty-house silence, organises sixty strangers into a choir, and makes you lead them in a Christmas Eve ambush of Bordeaux’s fanciest theatre. You discover your voice isn’t gone—it was just waiting for permission to come back, and that leading feels as natural as breathing once you remember how. You accidentally go viral on Instagram, get job offers, reconnect with your passion, and realize that your children leaving wasn’t an ending—it was finally having space to be yourself again, the self who made grown men cry with Puccini and told conductors they were musically illiterate, the self who can still command a room with one pure note and sixty people who trust you to make them sound like angels. You learn that identity isn’t something you lose when your children leave—it’s something you reclaim, one flash mob at a time, with friends who refuse to let you forget you were magnificent before motherhood and will be magnificent after.

What’s a holiday tradition you love? How could you involve a friend in it this year, or start a new tradition together?

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Stop second-guessing yourself. Start owning your success. This book gives you the step-by-step roadmap to break free from imposter syndrome, build unshakable confidence, and finally believe you deserve every bit of your success. You ARE Good Enough!

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

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Guiding others to live a purpose-powered, low-stress, savouring life during retreats on the Camino de Santiago in the sunblessed south of France. ⇓

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12/12/202512/12/2025

Countdown to Christmas Calendar Day 12

December 12, 2025 – 13 days to Christmas

Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships

Today’s Story: Lost in Time

Camille stood in the arched stone doorway of Jean-Luc’s wine cellar, convulsively clutching a dust-covered journal from 1847 like it was a sacred Christmas relic, trying—futilely—to appear composed. Behind her, a thick cloud of dirty smoke still billowed from the barn, where she had very nearly flambéed twenty thousand euros’ worth of oak barrels. In her defence, she had only wanted to “help” prepare the cellar for the holiday tastings. In the barn’s defence, it apparently preferred water to the highly flammable cleaning solvent she’d enthusiastically tossed over everything like a deranged elf.

It might be cold in the foothills of the Pyrenees this year, but her accidental arson attempt had certainly warmed things up.

“I think,” Jean-Luc said carefully, stumbling from the barn with a fire extinguisher, “that you should stick to working in the library, Professor. At least for today, ” and quietly to himself, “preferably forever.”

“So sorry, Jean-Luc, I was trying to be useful—”

“I know, but it cost me my eyebrows,” he said, as he guided her gently but firmly away from anything potentially flammable, potentially explosive or easily breakable. “Professor—”

“Former professor. Retired. Not much use now, I’m afraid,” she sighed.

“Former professor, current researcher, and currently banned from touching anything in the chai without supervision.” He steered her toward the rambling farmhouse—eighteenth-century stone, wrapped in dormant grapevines. Smoke curled from the chimney in slow, lazy spirals, carrying the unmistakable scent of burning oak and a hint of chestnuts roasting over an open fire. As they approached, Camille could hear the soft creak of the old wooden shutters shifting in the cold breeze and the distant hum of a radio playing an old French Christmas chanson, slightly crackling but impossibly charming.”There are three centuries of family documents in the library, Professor. I need you to organise them. I’m paying you to organise them. S’il vous plaît. Before you discover even more creative ways to destroy my livelihood.”

Camille trudged inside, feeling approximately ninety years old despite being only sixty-three. Three months into retirement, and she’d become spectacularly incompetent at everything except cataloguing the stories of people who were long dead.

It had started so well. Jean-Luc—one of her former students, now running his family’s boutique vineyard near Bordeaux—had hired her to research the estate’s history. A kind gesture. Possibly charity disguised as work, but Camille was too desperate to refuse.

She spent the first week happily and meticulously organising documents. Seventeenth-century land deeds, eighteenth-century harvest records, and nineteenth-century letters discussing phylloxera and family drama. She was in her element. But as the chaotic Christmas approached, she felt the need to contribute in a more practical, companionable way.

Take 1: She attempted to “assist” with racking wine from barrel to barrel. Knocked over a siphon. Fifty litres of 2023 Merlot flooded the cellar floor. Jean-Luc’s assistant, Baptiste, had actually burst into tears. Seriously overreacting, she thought, quand meme.

Take 2: Offered to help with bottling. Unintentionally reprogrammed the bottling machine. The three hundred bottles labelled as 2020 Cabernet Sauvignon were actually 2022 rosé. Baptiste stopped making eye contact.

Take 3: The barrel incident. Baptiste threatened to resign if she came anywhere near the chai again. The man was clearly unstable, prone to throwing temper tantrums at the slightest provocation.

So here she was, two days before Christmas, banished to the farmhouse library surrounded by documents and finally having to onboard the crushing realisation that knowing everything about medieval vine cultivation made her exactly zero per cent useful in the modern winemaking world.

Jean-Luc appeared with coffee, clearly on a mission.

“I need you to do something,” he said.

“If it involves wine, equipment, or anything that can catch fire—”

“Research. Your speciality.” He placed a folder on the desk. “Le Courrier de la Gironde wants a piece on historical Christmas traditions in Bordeaux vineyards. Five hundred words, wine-related, due in three days. They’re paying. You’re writing it.”

“Jean-Luc, I’m a historian, not a journalist—”

“You’re a storyteller who happens to have a PhD. Same thing, different audience. Also, Baptiste bet me fifty euros you’d say no, and I refuse to give him the satisfaction.”

So, with renewed vigour, Camille dove back into the archives, desperate to prove she still had marketable skills. The Christmas angle was tricky—most historical vineyard records focused on practical matters, not festivities.

Suddenly she saw it, half-hidden beneath a stack of dusty ledgers, brittle with age: a journal from 1803, penned by Jean-Luc’s great-great-great-something grandmother, Marguerite Duchamp. The moment Camille opened it, her pulse picked up. The handwriting swirled across the pages in lavish, looping flourishes, the French deliciously archaic, the revelations inside startlingly intimate… as if Marguerite herself had leaned across two centuries to whisper secrets straight into Camille’s ear.

24 décembre 1803: Once again, I have prepared the vin de Noël, exactly as Maman taught me all those decades ago. In another life, in fact. Cloves, cinnamon, orange peel, and honey from our hives. The workers gather at sunset. We will drink it together—all of us—because Christmas makes equals of us all. Papa would disapprove of this democratie, but Papa is dead.

Spellbound, Camille kept reading. Marguerite had maintained this tradition for forty years—spiced Christmas wine, shared with everyone who worked the vineyard, a deliberate breaking of social hierarchy that apparently scandalised her neighbours and delighted her loyal workers.

Marguerite had carefully written down the recipe, adding improvements over the years: a gentle red wine (Merlot, preferably young), specific spices in specific quantities, precise temperatures and timings, and a blessing Marguerite had created for the occasion that mixed Catholic prayer with what sounded suspiciously like pagan harvest incantations.

“Jean-Luc!” Camille burst into the chai where he was doing something technical with a hydrometer. “You need to see this! Right now!”

She explained about Marguerite, the Christmas wine, the tradition that had apparently died with her in 1843.

Jean-Luc read the journal entries, his face softening. “I never knew about this. Grand-mère never mentioned it.”

“Probably got lost. Families forget traditions, especially controversial ones. That’s why archives matter.” Camille felt something unfamiliar stir in her chest: purpose. “I could write about this for the article. The lost tradition, your ancestor’s decidedly democratic feast—”

“Encore mieux,” Jean-Luc interrupted, “you could help me revive it.”

“What?” She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Christmas Eve. Tomorrow. We make Marguerite’s vin de Noël. Share it with everyone—the family, our workers, neighbours, that annoying couple from the tourism board who keep asking for ‘authentic wine-related experiences.’ You sort it. Source the ingredients, and recreate the tradition. Make it come alive again. Give it back to us.”

“Jean-Luc, I nearly burned down your barn—”

“This doesn’t involve machinery or fire-starting possibilities. Enfin, it shouldn’t. Just wine, spices, and historical accuracy. Your actual skillset.” He grinned. “Unless you’re too afraid to try? I could ask Baptiste?”

“I AM terrified. Of being useless, of becoming invisible in retirement, being irrelevant, the fact that I apparently can’t operate simple tools—”

“Bien sûr, c’est plutôt normale. So do this thing you’re actually qualified for. Show yourself you still have value beyond a title that doesn’t exist anymore.”

On Christmas Eve morning, Camille was in Jean-Luc’s farmhouse kitchen, and it soon smelled like a medieval apothecary had exploded in there.

The recipe required:

10 litres young Merlot (Jean-Luc’s 2023, still developing)
Cinnamon sticks (8, Ceylon variety, because Camille had opinions)
Whole cloves (precisely 24, Marguerite’s journal was specific)
Orange peel (dried, from Seville oranges, which required a panicked phone call to a spice merchant in Bordeaux)
Honey (local, from hives tended by Jean-Luc’s neighbour)
“A measure of Armagnac for spirit and warmth” (Marguerite’s words; Camille scientifically interpreted this as “a fair bit”)

Baptiste watched skeptically as Camille heated wine in an enormous pot, adding spices with the precision of someone who’d spent forty years citing sources.

“Professor, the temperature—”

“I know what I’m doing,” Camille said, which was actually partly true.

She added cinnamon. The kitchen was filled with warmth. Cloves next—pungent, sharp. Orange peel. Zany and full of zest. The wine turned aromatic, complex, and started smelling like Christmas.

“Honey,” she said. Baptiste handed it over. Holding her breath, she stirred it in slowly, watching it dissolve. “Armagnac.”

“How much?”

“Marguerite says ‘enough to honour the harvest.’ Quite a bit, I think,” she said as she emptied a bottle of millesime Armagnac into her concoction. And then another one, it was Christmas, after all.

She poured. The wine darkened, enriched. She tasted it hesitantly, expecting disaster.

It was mindblowing. Literally.

Not just good—perfect. Spiced but not overwhelming, sweet but balanced, warming in a way that had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with the particular alchemy of ingredients that belonged together.

Baptiste tasted it. His eyes widened. “Professor, this is—”

“Historically accurate?”

“This is going to make Jean-Luc VERY popular with the tourism board.”

Much later, at sunset, the vineyard courtyard glowed with candles and fairy lights. Thirty people had gathered—workers, neighbours, local officials, the annoying tourism couple (who were actually quite nice), Baptiste, Jean-Luc’s grandmother, who’d driven two hours from Bordeaux.

Camille stood at a wooden table holding Marguerite’s journal and a ladle, feeling like an imposter about to be exposed.

Jean-Luc appeared beside her. “Ready?”

“To make a fool of myself? Absolutely.”

“To share something unique you discovered and brought back to life. Venez gouter les amis, c’est le moment!”

She ladled wine into cups—mismatched, ceramic, borrowed from everyone’s kitchens. Everyone was impatient to take their first sip.

Camille cleared her throat. “This recipe is from 1803. Marguerite Duchamp, who then owned this vineyard, made this wine every Christmas Eve and shared it with everyone who worked in her vineyard. She wrote—” Camille opened the journal and read slowly: “At Christmas, we are all equal in the vineyard and before God. May this wine warm us, may this gathering bind us, may we remember that the harvest belongs to all who tend it.“

She raised her cup. “To Marguerite. To traditions worth reviving. To the fact that I successfully made something without destroying Jean-Luc’s property or traumatising Baptiste.”

“Santé!” everyone chorused.

They drank. They gasped. They looked up in awe.

Jean-Luc’s grandmother grabbed Camille’s arm. “You’re the professor?”

“Former professor—”

“Bah, ‘former.’ You brought my great-grandmother back to life. That’s not ‘former’ anything. That’s fully present. Here and now.” She squeezed Camille’s hand. “Jean-Luc says you’ve been regretting your retirement.”

“Not regretting exactly—”

“And nearly set his barn on fire. Because you thought you were only useful when you were working at the university. But look—” She gestured at the courtyard, people laughing, drinking, Baptiste explaining to the tourism couple how Camille had sourced sixteenth-century orange peel like a detective. “You are useful here. In knowing things, teaching things, and bringing dead things back to life. That’s not retirement. That’s your next chapter.”

Later, Jean-Luc found Camille sitting in the kitchen.

“The article?” he asked.

“Submitted. Five hundred words on Marguerite Duchamp and her unique vin chaud. The editor called it ‘unexpectedly compelling.’ I think she meant ‘surprisingly not boring.'”

“You’re a genius at historical research. It’s your thing.” He sat beside her. “Professor—”

“Camille. I’m not a professor anymore.”

“You’ll always be Professor to me. Titles aren’t just what institutions give us. They’re what we earn through expertise. You earned yours. Retirement didn’t take it away—it just freed you to use your skills differently.”

Above them, stars were appearing. They sat in comfortable silence, drinking the last of Marguerite’s wine, while Christmas settled over the vineyard like a blessing. Camille thought about Marguerite, about creating controversial new traditions and her own ability to bring dead things back to life through careful research and questionable amounts of Armagnac.

Firm Foundations for Your Future Protocol – a fast-paced, high-impact, future-focused course that facilitates the construction of identity-shaping stories about your future self so that you can make the changes needed to avoid having to go through big life changes again and again—without needing to process your past in depth and in detail.

Author’s note: True story – from my own family’s winemaking history. Names and location changed, obviously.

The Make Friends and Maintain Friendships Masterplan

Friendships aren’t always perfect, and misunderstandings can create distance. But the holiday season is a time for healing. Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or condoning—it means freeing yourself from resentment and opening the door for connection.

Think about a friend you’ve had a disagreement with. Could this season be an opportunity to mend the relationship? Even a small step toward reconciliation can bring peace to your heart.

When retirement or a career transition makes you feel useless, reach out to someone who values your expertise in a new context—and actually accept projects that scare you.
Let them challenge you to apply your skills differently. Stop trying to be useful in ways that don’t suit you, and start being useful in ways only you can be.

Worst case scenario: You discover some things you’re genuinely bad at (winemaking equipment, apparently), survive some embarrassing disasters, and have good stories about the time you almost burned down a barn.

Best case: Your former student becomes your collaborator who shows you that expertise doesn’t retire—it just finds new applications. You discover that bringing dead things back to life through research is exactly as valuable as you always thought, maybe more so, because now you’re doing it for love and curiosity instead of tenure requirements. You accidentally create traditions, write compelling articles, become the person the tourism board calls for “authentic experiences,” and realise that your value was never in your title—it was in your knowledge, your passion, your ability to read eighteenth-century French and translate it into spiced wine that makes people feel connected to something larger than themselves. You learn that retirement isn’t about becoming useless—it’s about finally being free to be useful in exactly the ways you were meant to be, without committee meetings or grading papers, just you and the archives and people who actually want what you know, which turns out to be everything you needed.

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11/12/202511/12/2025

Countdown Christmas Calendar Day 11

Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships

December 11, 2025 – 14 days to Christmas

Today’s Story: The Plum Pudding Rebellion

Isabelle sat in her car outside the Agen Christmas market, watching people buy things they didn’t need with money they hadn’t earned yet. Her phone buzzed. Her mother. Again. Seventh call this week.

She let it go to voicemail, already knowing what it would say: “Have you talked to your boss about that promotion yet? Your cousin just got promoted. Again. Call me back.”

Her boss didn’t exist anymore. Neither did her job. “Restructuring due to budgetary constraints”—twenty-eight years of public sector employment, gone in one meeting and a severance package that wouldn’t last through January.

She’d told no one. Not her mother, not her sister, definitely not her cousin.

Her phone buzzed again. Text this time. Agnès.

Stop hiding in your car. We can see you from the stall. Come and help us, or we’re coming to get you and it will be seriously embarrassing for everyone.

Isabelle looked up. Across the market square, Agnès, brandishing a wooden spoon dripping with batter, was waving enthusiastically.

She scrambled out of the car.

Golden lights shimmered across the square as the smell of gingerbread, pine needles, and sizzling duck fat curled through the air. Vendors shouted cheerful greetings over a soundtrack of brass bands and upbeat Noël classics. Stalls draped in garlands offered heaps of woollen mittens, hand-carved wooden toys, delicate hand-blown glass ornaments and velvety scarves. A group of children rushed past her, leaving a trail of giggles behind them.

Agnès and Thomas’s stall was organised chaos barely contained by wooden crates: jars of preserved plums, bottles of prune liqueur, and a mountain of what looked like small, dark cannonballs wrapped in cheesecloth.

“Plum puddings,” Agnès announced, thrusting one into Isabelle’s hands. It was surprisingly heavy. “Traditional English Christmas pudding, but made with Agen prunes instead of raisins. Revolutionary. Also, possibly illegal—we haven’t checked.”

“Why would it be illegal?” Isabelle asked.

“Everything fun is illegal,” Thomas said philosophically. He was tall, bearded, wearing an apron that said “Agriculteur et Fier“—farmer and proud. “Also, we’re threatening the bûche de Noël monopoly. People take their Christmas desserts very seriously here. We’ve had threats.”

“Threats?”

“Mostly passive-aggressive. One woman told Agnès our puddings looked like ‘something from the compost heap.’ Another said we were ‘betraying French Christmas traditions.’ Very dramatic. We consider it free publicity.”

Agnès grabbed Isabelle’s arm. “Thanks for offering to help us today. We have forty puddings to sell, three more markets to do, and Thomas pulled his back lifting a crate this morning like an idiot.”

“I’m not an idiot, I’m old—”

“You’re fifty-two, pas plus. Isabelle, you’re in charge of sales, organisation, and preventing Thomas from arguing with customers about the cultural superiority of pudding over bûche.”

“I don’t know anything about selling—”

“You managed an entire department of public servants who didn’t want to be managed. This is easier. These puddings actually want to be sold.”

Before Isabelle could protest further, a customer appeared—an elderly woman, sceptical expression, the look of someone who’d been eating bûche de Noël since the invention of Christmas.

“What,” she said, “is this?”

Isabelle panicked. Looked at Agnès. Back at the woman. At the pudding in her hands.

“It’s a plum pudding,” she heard herself say. “A traditional English Christmas dessert, made with local Agen prunes. All ingredients from within fifty kilometres. Soaked in Armagnac. Takes three months to mature properly. You steam it on Christmas Day, serve it with brandy butter or crème anglaise.”

The woman’s eyebrows rose. “Steam it? Like vegetables?”

“Like tradition. This recipe is older than the Republic. Older than Napoleon. Probably older than this market.” Isabelle was making things up now, but it felt good. “You can’t buy this in a supermarket. It’s made by two people who left sensible jobs to make something real with their hands instead of pushing papers around desks.”

The woman bought three.

After she left, Agnès stared at Isabelle. “Where did that come from?”

“I have no idea. I think I’m having a breakdown.”

“Have a few more while we sell out. You’re a natural.”

By the third market, in a town called Nérac, where fairy lights swung between bare plane trees, they’d developed a system. Isabelle handled customers with the organisational precision of someone who’d spent eighteen years managing bureaucratic chaos. Thomas managed the inventory. Agnès handled production crises and periodic announcements like “we’re out of brandy butter” or “someone just asked if the puddings are vegan, and I may have laughed.”

During a lull, Thomas handed Isabelle a bowl and a large wooden spoon. “New batch. Help me to mix it?”

The bowl contained what looked like the combined contents of a fruit shop and a liquor store: chopped prunes, candied orange peel, almonds, flour, butter, eggs, and enough Armagnac to sterilise surgical equipment.

“Just mix,” Thomas said. “Fold it together. Don’t overthink.”

Isabelle plunged her spoon in. The mixture was thick, sticky, and smelled like Armagnac-soaked fruit and butter and something darkly spiced she couldn’t identify.

“Nutmeg,” Agnès said, appearing beside her. “And cinnamon. The secret ingredient though is cardamom. Don’t tell anyone, or we’ll have to kill you.”

They mixed in companionable silence—Isabelle’s spoon working the pudding mixture while Thomas added ingredients and Agnès wrapped finished puddings in cheesecloth with the efficiency of someone who’d done this a thousand times.

“What’s up, Izzy?” Agnès said eventually.

“I got laid off,” Isabelle said. The words came out easily, surprisingly. “Six weeks ago. I haven’t told anyone. I’ve been sitting in my apartment eating cereal and applying for jobs I’m not qualified for.”

Thomas stopped measuring flour. Agnès’s hands stilled.

“Why didn’t you call us?” Thomas asked.

“Because you left five years ago to do this—” Isabelle gestured at the stall, the puddings, their obvious success “—and I stayed. Safe job, predictable pension, slowly dying inside. I thought you’d judge me.”

“Judge you?” Agnès laughed. “Isabelle, we were terrified when we left. Absolutely convinced we’d fail and have to crawl back begging for our old jobs. You know what kept us going?”

“Stubbornness?”

“That too. But also, we knew how to organise. How to plan. How to manage inventory, track expenses, and deal with bureaucracy. All the things we learned in those terrible office jobs.” She squeezed Isabelle’s shoulder. “You have those skills. You’re using them right now. You sold forty puddings using nothing but organisational competence and mild desperation.”

“That’s not a business plan—”

“Of course it is,” Thomas interrupted. “Look at today. You reorganised our stall layout—sales up thirty per cent. You created a customer tracking system using a notebook and a pencil. You convinced a woman who called our puddings ‘compost’ to buy three of them. These are marketable skills.”

Isabelle looked at her hands, still covered in pudding mixture. At the stall they’d somehow made more efficient. At the empty crates that had been full this morning.

“I don’t know what I’d sell,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter yet,” Agnès said. “First, you help us through the Christmas season. Second, we teach you everything we know about small businesses. Third, you figure out what you want to make or do or sell. Fourth, we help you do it. This is the plan.”

“That’s not a very well-planned plan.”

“It worked just fine for us.” Thomas handed her a finished pudding. “Et voilà. First one of the new batch. Take it home. Make it for Christmas.”

On Christmas Eve, the steaming pudding filled Isabelle’s apartment with a luxurious haze of fat, juicy, sun-kissed plums, lifted by zany orange zest and notes of cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove, enriched by a generous soaking of 10-year-old Armagnac. The first bite was rich, dense, and deeply comforting—molasses, tender fruit, toasted nuts, and spice melting together in slow, velvety harmony. It was the kind of flavour that insists you pause, breathe in, and savour.

Isabelle’s phone buzzed insistently. Agnès.

Boxing Day market. 6 AM. Bring coffee and your organisational brain. We’re teaching you pricing strategy and you’re teaching us how to file taxes properly. Partnership?

Isabelle typed back: Bien entendu. Partnership.

Outside, church bells rang. Inside, a woman who’d spent twenty-eight years behind a desk slowly savoured the most marvellous Christmas pudding she had ever tasted and thought about what her loss of safety had bought her: the strange discovery that sometimes losing everything means finding more than you ever dreamed of having.

The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan

Laughter is one of the quickest ways to strengthen friendships. In the midst of life’s challenges, a shared joke or a moment of silliness can lighten the load and bring you closer to your friends.

This holiday season, let laughter be your gift. Seek out moments of joy, whether it’s through funny holiday movies, playful traditions, or simply sharing a funny memory with a friend.

When you lose your job-tied identity, reach out to friends who’ve successfully reinvented themselves—and actually accept their help.
Let them put you to work. Learn their business. Translate your “useless” skills into new contexts. Be willing to get your hands dirty (literally, with pudding mixture) doing something completely different from what you did before.

Worst case scenario: You spend a few weeks helping friends with their business, learn some new skills, and go back to traditional job hunting with better stories and references.

Best case scenario: You discover that all those “boring” administrative skills—organisation, planning, attention to detail, managing difficult people—are actually the foundation of entrepreneurship. Your friends become mentors who show you that reinvention isn’t about having a brilliant idea, it’s about having the courage to try something and the skills to make it work. You end up with a business partnership, your mother’s investment, and the realisation that the job that defined you for eighteen years was actually just training for what comes next. You learn that sometimes losing everything means you finally have space to build something that’s actually yours, and that the best business plan starts with friends who refuse to let you eat cereal alone in your apartment when they know you’re capable of so much more.

What Christmas memory always makes you laugh? How can you recreate or celebrate that joy this season?

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10/12/202510/12/2025

Countdown to Christmas Calendar Day 10

Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships

December 10, 2025 – 15 days to Christmas

Today’s Story: Chocolate, Sausage, and Salvation

Pierre stared at the email on his phone screen with the particular despair of someone who’d just watched their dreams get bureaucratically slaugthered. Again.

“Re: Mobile Food Service Permit Application #2847-B. Unfortunately, we require additional documentation regarding…”

He stopped reading. There were seventeen more paragraphs. There were always at least seventeen more paragraphs.

Behind him, his food truck La Route Épicée, painted an optimistic orange-and-yellow, equipped with a state-of-the-art kitchen he’d gone into serious debt for, sat immobile in a parking lot on the outskirts of Bayonne. It had been sitting there for three months. Three months of paperwork. Three months of “just one more form.” Three months of watching the Christmas market season—the lucrative, business-saving Christmas market season approach.

His phone rang. Maïa.

“You got the email,” she said. Not a question.

“How did you—”

“Because I know that sound you just made. The sound of a man being slowly strangled by French bureaucracy. Come to the shop. I have chocolate. Also, I have a plan.”

“I don’t need chocolate, I need a permit—”

“Everyone needs chocolate. Especially people lying to themselves about not needing chocolate.”

Maïa’s chocolaterie sat in the heart of old Bayonne, all exposed stone and wooden beams, the air thick with the smell of cocoa and caramelised sugar.

Maïa stood behind the counter wearing an apron that said “La Vie est Courte, Mangez du Chocolat“—life is short, eat chocolate. She was thirty-two, Pierre’s age, and had somehow managed to build a successful business while he was fighting self-righteous bureaucrats who seemed to have a vendetta against him, personally.

She slid a plate across the counter. Three pieces of dark chocolate, each topped with something unexpected: espelette pepper, fleur de sel, smoked paprika.

“Eat,” she commanded. “Then we talk about your terrible decision-making.”

Somewhat miffed, Pierre nevertheless ate. The chocolate was perfect—bitter, complex, the pepper building slowly at the back of his throat.

“You’re wasting your time,” Maïa said.

“Excuse me?”

“The permit. You’re fighting a system designed to make you quit. It’s nearly November. Even if you got approved tomorrow—which you won’t—you’d miss the entire Christmas season. Face it: your food truck is dead until January.”

Pierre felt something crack in his chest. Hearing it said out loud made it heart-wrenchingly real.

“So what am I supposed to do? Give up? Go back to working in someone else’s kitchen?”

“Non.” Maïa leaned forward. “You take a stand at the Chocolate Fair.”

The Salon du Chocolat de Bayonne—Bayonne’s famous chocolate fair. Chocolatiers from across the Basque Country and beyond set up elaborate stalls. Thousands of people attended. It was, essentially, chocolate Disneyland.

“I don’t make chocolate, Maïa. I make—”

“Fusion cuisine that nobody can try because your truck is a very expensive parking ornament. I know.” She pulled out her phone, showed him photos. “I have a double stall this year. Very prestigious, corner position. I’m offering you half. You make a small menu—four dishes, maybe five—incorporating Basque chocolate. Savoury, sweet, whatever your brain comes up with. We split the space, split the costs, you get access to my permits and my suppliers.”

“That’s not my concept—”

“Your concept is currently sitting in a parking lot, making no money AT ALL and crushing your soul. This is called adaptation. Also called not being a complete idiot.” The joy of having friends who don’t beat around the bush.

Pierre looked at the chocolate on the counter. At Maïa’s face—determined, certain, the expression of someone who’d already decided this was happening and was just waiting for him to catch up.

“I don’t know anything about cooking with chocolate.”

“Good thing your best friend is a chocolatier then, isn’t it?”

There were only five days left until the fair opened.

Maïa’s kitchen became a laboratory of taste bud destroying disasters. Pierre’s first attempt—duck confit with chocolate mole—was so rich it felt like eating velvet-covered concrete. His second—chocolate-espelette glazed pork belly—set off the smoke alarm and made Maïa’s assistant cry (probably from the pepper, though it was hard to tell). The third attempt—chocolate-infused squid ink risotto—looked like something dredged from the bottom of a gothic lake and tasted, according to Maïa, “like the ocean had a nervous breakdown and decided to punish humanity.” They tried to feed it to Maïa’s neighbour’s cat, who sniffed it once and walked away with visible disdain.

The chocolate and anchovy croquettes that were theoretically sound—salty, bitter, fried—but in practice tasted like Pierre had weaponised the concept of umami. Maïa took one bite, held up her hand for silence, chewed thoughtfully, then said, “I think you’ve created something that violates the Geneva Convention.”

“You’re thinking too complicated,” she said, rescuing the pork belly before it became charcoal. “This is Basque Country. People want familiar made interesting, not interesting made incomprehensible.”

“I don’t do familiar. I do fusion—”

“Fusion is just familiar ingredients having an identity crisis. Stop fighting your location. Use it.”

She handed him a bar of her signature dark chocolate—70% cacao from Cameroonian beans, made in Bayonne for three generations. “Start here. What does this taste like?”

Pierre closed his eyes, let the chocolate melt on his tongue. “Earth. Smoke. Something almost savoury.”

“Exactement. So use it that way. Think: what grows here? What do people eat here? How does chocolate fit?”

By day three, they had it:

Txistorra sausage with a chocolate-red wine reduction. The sausage—spicy, fatty, distinctly Basque—cut by the bittersweet depth of Maïa’s chocolate and local Irouléguy wine.

Pan-seared foie gras with a chocolate-and-pear compote. Controversial, decadent, impossible to stop eating.

Marmitako—traditional Basque tuna stew—finished with a square of dark chocolate that melted into the broth, adding complexity without sweetness.

And for dessert: gâteau Basque reimagined, filled with chocolate-cherry cream, topped with candied espelette.

“This,” Maïa said, tasting the tuna stew on day four, “this is what you should have been making all along. This is you, but also Basque. Fusion that makes sense.”

Pierre stared at her. “You just revolutionised my entire business concept in a kitchen the size of a closet.”

“Eh oui, so I did. You’re welcome. Also, dinner is on you tonight.”

That year, the Chocolate Fair exploded with people—locals, tourists, families with children hopped up on sugar samples, serious foodies with notebooks, everyone drawn by the smell of chocolate handmade-with-love and Pierre’s sausages sizzling on Maïa’s portable burner.

Their stall looked like controlled chaos. Maïa’s chocolates on one side—elegant, precisely arranged—Pierre’s pop-up kitchen on the other, steam rising, plates moving, the scent of his cooking cutting through the sweetness like a jazz note in a symphony.

By noon, they’d sold out of the foie gras.

By three, the tuna stew was gone.

By five, people were queuing thirty deep, phones out, taking photos of Pierre’s dishes, of Maïa’s chocolates, of the sign Pierre had hastily made: “Basque Fusion—La Route Épicée@Maïa Chocolaterie.”

A food critic from Sud Ouest approached tentatively, tasted everything, took notes with an expression that revealed nothing and everything. A chef from San Sebastián tried the txistorra, closed his eyes, and said something in rapid Euskara that made Maïa laugh.

“What did he say?”

“That you’ve finally stopped being a Parisian chef pretending to understand the Basque Country and started being a Basque chef with a few promising ideas.”

Pierre wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an insult. Didn’t matter—the man bought six portions to take back to his restaurant.

By closing time, they were exhausted, depleted, covered in chocolate and olive oil and the particular satisfaction of having fed several hundred people something they’d remember. For a long time.

Maïa produced a bottle from under the counter. Patxaran—traditional Basque sloe berry liqueur, dark red, smelling of anise and success.

“To adaptation,” she said, pouring two glasses.

“To friends with brilliant ideas,” Pierre countered.

They clinked glasses, drank, and watched the fair wind down around them—the lights, the people, the success that had materialised from desperation and friendship and Maïa’s refusal to let Pierre’s concept die in a parking lot.

Pierre’s phone buzzed. An email. He almost ignored it.

The food critic. Five stars. Photos of every dish. Final line: “La Route Épicée has found its route—and it runs directly through the Basque Country’s heart, with a stop at Maïa’s chocolaterie. Book ahead for January.”

“We’re doing this again,” Pierre said. “Not just Chocolate fairs in November. Christmas. New Year. Regular pop-ups. Your kitchen, my food, our collaboration.”

“Obviously. You think I’d let you go back to fighting permit applications alone? You’d starve.”

Pierre laughed, surveyed the disaster zone of their successful day, and thought about how sometimes the best business plan is just having someone who believes in you enough to hand you half their stall and say, “Now stop being stupid and cook.”

The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan

The holiday season is the perfect time to reconnect with old friends. Life transitions often pull us in different directions, but that doesn’t mean the bond is lost. Sometimes, reaching out after years apart can feel like picking up right where you left off.

Think about someone you’ve lost touch with—a friend who once meant a lot to you. What would it feel like to reconnect? You might just reignite a friendship that brings new joy and comfort.

Next time you’re stuck in a professional or creative crisis, reach out to a friend who understands your field—and be willing to accept help that looks different from what you imagined. Ask for advice. Accept the corner of someone’s stall, their kitchen, their contacts, their hard-won local knowledge. Be willing to adapt your vision to reality without abandoning what makes it yours.

Worst case scenario: Your collaboration doesn’t work, you spend a week trying something different, and you go back to your original plan with new insights.

Best case scenario: Your best friend revolutionises your entire business concept in five days, gives you access to their infrastructure and their community connections, challenges you to stop fighting your location and start using it, and accidentally creates a partnership that transforms both your businesses. You discover that adaptation isn’t failure—it’s evolution, and sometimes the thing you thought was a compromise (chocolate in your savoury dishes, a pop-up instead of a food truck, fusion that respects its foundation) becomes the signature that makes everything work. You learn that friendship in business isn’t just emotional support—it’s someone handing you half their stall and saying “stop being stubborn, cook something,” and refusing to let your dream die in a parking lot because bureaucracy is terrible, but giving up is worse.

If you’re currently stuck in bureaucratic hell or professional limbo with a dream that’s going nowhere, what would your Maïa tell you to do differently?

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Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.

09/12/202510/12/2025

Countdown To Christmas Calendar Day 9

9 December 2025, 16 days to Christmas!

Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships

Today’s Story: Ste Suzanne’s Crèche Vivante

Sophie stood at the kitchen window of the ancient half-timbered farmhouse. Vineyards stretch across the rolling hills, their geometric rows precise even in dormancy. The gnarled trunks of the vines are twisted with age. The leaves are long gone, leaving only the dark, knotted wood, almost black against the frost-whitened earth.

A morning mist still pools in the valleys, thick and stagnant, obscuring where the vineyard rows end and the next hill begins. It moves slowly, deliberately, with intention. Finally, the sun breaks through—thin and watery, a December sun that promises light but not warmth—the mist burns off in patches, revealing the landscape piece by piece: a stone chai here, a distant farmhouse there, the Pyrenees rising sharply and startlingly white on the horizon.

Behind her, Clara’s bedroom door was firmly closed—had been closed, in fact, for most of the three weeks since they’d moved here from Toulouse. The silence from that room was solid and slow, something physical she kept bumping into.

A sudden, persistent knocking at the front door startled her from her reverie. In three weeks, exactly two people came knocking: a curious postman (once) and a confused delivery driver looking for a different address (once).

A woman in her seventies stood shivering on the doorstep, shaking a dripping umbrella with one hand and clutching a covered dish in the other. She had the kind of face that suggested she’d seen everything worth seeing and found most of it less than amusing.

“Bonjour! I am Madame Belmont. I live three houses down, the one with the blue shutters. I have brought you some cassoulet.”

Sophie, who had in fact been planning a jambon-fromage dinner, accepted the dish gratefully. “Très grand merci. This smells awesome. So very kind.”

“Bof. It’s just beans and duck.” Madame Belmont peered past her into the house. “You have a daughter, oui? Fifteen? Sixteen? I saw her once, looking very much like someone who would rather be anywhere else than in Ste Suzanne.”

“Sixteen. And yes.”

“Ahh. The age of such self-righteousness! When you are certain your mother has ruined your life and that small villages are where joy goes to die.” She said this with such cheerful matter-of-factness that Sophie almost laughed. “I have a proposition for your daughter. May I come in?”

Maybe Sophie should have said no. Maybe should have protected Clara’s fragile privacy, her right to be furious about this relocation. Instead, she found herself saying, “Coffee?”

Sitting at Sophie’s kitchen table, drinking terrible instant coffee without complaint, Madame Belmont explained the concept of the Crèche Vivante.

“Every Christmas Eve, we bring the Nativity to life in the village square. Real people, real animals. Last year the donkey ate Baby Jesus’s straw bed and we had to improvise with someone’s jacket. All very authentic, actually.”

“That sounds… chaotic.”

“Entièrement! En plus, this year, our costume maker, Colette, a lovely woman, terrible sense of style, created everything from brown potato sacks, has moved to Pau to live with her daughter. We are desperate.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “I saw your daughter’s fashion sketchbook. She left it on the garden wall last week. I did not snoop—it was open, the wind was turning pages like it wanted me to see. She has talent.”

Sophie’s chest tightened. “Clara’s going through a difficult time. We both are. I don’t think—”

“I am not asking you to think. I am asking you if she knows how to sew.”

“She… used to. Before.”

Before the divorce. Before Sophie’s ex-husband decided his new life didn’t have room for weekend custody. Before Sophie looked at their Toulouse apartment—expensive, cramped, full of memories that hurt—and thought: We need to get away from here.

“Parfait.” Madame Belmont stood, decision apparently made. “I will ask her myself. Which door?”

“She won’t—she doesn’t—” But Madame Belmont was already in the hallway, knocking firmly on Clara’s door with the confidence of someone who’d raised four children and wasn’t intimidated by teenage sulking.

“Clara! I am Madame Belmont. I need a costume designer for our village Christmas pageant. Your mother says you sew.”

Silence. Then, incredibly, the door opened a crack.

“I don’t know anyone here,” Clara whispered.

“Bon. Then you can design the costumes without worrying about hurting people’s feelings, oui?”

The door opened wider. Clara stood there in an oversized sweatshirt, her dark hair in a messy bun, looking younger than sixteen and older than she should have to. “What kind of costumes?”

“Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, angels, animals. The usual suspects.”

The corner of Clara’s mouth twitched. Almost a smile. “I’d need to see the fabrics you have.”

“Naturellement. Come to my house tomorrow, three o’clock. I will show you everything. Also, I make excellent hot chocolate, not the powder nonsense, real chocolate melted with milk and melt-in-the-mouth calissons on the side.”

After Madame Belmont left—leaving the cassoulet, her phone number, and a subtle frison of revival in her wake—Clara emerged fully from her room for the first time in days.

“You told her about my sketchbook?”

“Not I. The wind did, apparently.”

Clara sat at the kitchen table, pulling the cassoulet toward her and eating directly from the dish with a spoon. “Her house is the one with blue shutters?”

“Three down.”

“Okay. I’ll go. But just to look. I’m not promising anything.”

“Understood.”

“And I’m still moving back to Toulouse as soon as I finish school.”

“Noted.”

Clara took another bite. “This is really good.”

Clara started disappearing to Madame Belmont’s house daily, the one with blue shutters that Sophie could see from the kitchen window, and return hours later with fabric scraps in her hair, pins stuck to her sweater, talking about seam allowances and Biblical-era authenticity and whether angels should have practical footwear.

Sophie started helping—not because she knew anything about costumes, but because Madame Belmont recruited her with the same cheerful inevitability she’d used on Clara.

“You can hem, oui? Everyone can hem. It’s just making things shorter with thread.” Not patronising at all then.

Madame Belmont’s house smelled like hot chocolate and old books, a place that had been lived in happily for decades. Her dining room had become costume central—fabrics draped over every surface, Clara’s sketches pinned to the walls, the sewing machine (older than Sophie, still functioning perfectly) humming at all hours.

Other village women appeared: Thérèse with her mother’s lace collection, Anne-Marie with sheets they could dye for shepherd robes, and young Émilie, who was taught how to embroider by her grandmother. They worked in companionable chaos, drinking coffee, sharing gossip, teaching Clara techniques she wouldn’t have found in YouTube tutorials.

Sophie hemmed angel robes beside Thérèse, who told stories about her son in Paris—also sixteen, also angry about village life until he’d left and realised he missed it, desperately. Or maybe he just hated having to do his own laundry.

“Your daughter,” Madame Belmont said one evening, watching Clara explain her design vision to Émilie with the confidence of someone who’d found her element, “she is gifted. Not just at sewing.”

“She gets that from her father,” Sophie said automatically.

“Non.” Madame Belmont’s voice was firm. “She gets it from watching her mother be brave enough to start over. From learning that sometimes leaving is the only way forward.”

Sophie’s eyes burned. “I don’t feel brave. I feel like I’ve dragged her to the middle of nowhere and ruined her life.”

“Bof. You’re a mother. Feeling guilty is part of the job description.” Madame Belmont patted her hand. “Look, she’s laughing now. When did you last hear her laugh?”

Clara was indeed laughing at something Émilie had said about last year’s donkey fiasco. The sound resonated around Madame Belmont’s dining room like a Christmas bell.

Two weeks later, Christmas Eve arrived cold and crystalline, the kind of night where breath hung visible in the air, and stars felt close enough to touch. The village square of Sainte-Suzanne glowed with hundreds of candles, tapers flickering in iron lanterns hung from the plane trees, their flames wavering in the December wind but refusing to die. Behind it all, the stone church rose ancient and implacable, its romanesque walls honey-colored in the candlelight, its bell tower dark against the indigo sky.

The entire village had turned out for the Crèche Vivante—elderly couples in heavy coats, families with sleepy children bundled in scarves, teenagers trying to look bored but enchanted anyway—everyone gathered in that particular hush that comes when a community anticipates entertainment. The air smelled of wood smoke and beeswax, cold stone and the faint sweetness of vin chaud being poured at a makeshift stand near the church steps, steam rising from cups clasped in gloved hands.

Sophie stood with Madame Belmont at the edge, watching Clara make last-minute adjustments to Mary’s costume, pins in her mouth, completely in her element.

Then Mary and Joseph (and the donkey, on a lead, because he was so not carrying anyone or anything) started walking around the square, their costumes glowing in candlelight. Clara’s designs transformed the familiar story into something ethereal. The shepherds’ robes moved like water. The angels’ wings caught light as if they might actually take flight. Even the wise men looked properly regal instead of like revenants wearing brown potato sacks.

When it ended, the village burst into spontaneous applause. Someone shouted Clara’s name. Then someone else. She stood there, stunned, as people she’d barely met thanked her, complimented her work, and welcomed her.

Walking back to their farmhouse later, Clara slipped her hand into Sophie’s—something she hadn’t done in years.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“I still want to go to art school in Toulouse eventually.”

“I know.”

“But maybe… I could just go during term.”

Sophie squeezed her hand, afraid to speak, afraid she’d cry.

“It’s still the middle of nowhere.”

“It is.”

“But it’s kind of our middle of nowhere now. You know?”

Sophie did know. She looked back at the village square, still glowing with candlelight, and at Madame Belmont’s house with its blue shutters, and thought about how home wasn’t something you returned to—it was something you built, stitch by stitch, with people brave enough to knock on your door and refuse to let you isolate yourself in your grief.

“En effet,” Sophie said. “I know.”

The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan

In winter, the vineyards might look like they’re dying, but the vignerons know better—beneath the frozen ground, the roots are growing ever deeper, intertwining with neighbouring vines in an underground network of support that will sustain them through the growing season.

Friendship works the same way: it’s in the cold, dormant seasons of life that the surprising new connections can form, initially invisible but soon essential, so that when spring finally comes, you discover you’ve been held up by roots you didn’t even know were there.

Today, join one community activity where you live, especially if you’re going through a difficult transition—even if (especially) if you’re convinced you don’t belong there yet.
Volunteer for something. Join a committee. Show up to a community event. Offer your skills, whatever they are—cooking, organising, designing, hemming, showing up with hands willing to help.
Worst case scenario: You spend a few awkward hours with people you don’t know well, contribute something small, and go home still feeling uncomfortable about being the new person.
Best case scenario: You accidentally find your Madame Belmont—the person who sees past your walls and your grief and your conviction that you don’t belong, who recruits you and your daughter into community with the cheerful inevitability of someone who knows that isolation is a choice and belonging is work worth doing. You discover that talent and contribution are better icebreakers than small talk, that your teenager starts laughing again because someone gave her purpose beyond her anger, that home isn’t about geography—it’s about being seen and needed and welcomed for exactly what you can offer. You realise six months later that you’ve stopped planning your escape because somewhere between hemming angel robes and finding out which is the best boulangerie, you accidentally built a life, and the people who were strangers became the ones you text when anything—good or bad—happens, because they saw you at your most lost and said “here, try this” and refused to let you disappear into your grief and behind your closed doors.

Have you ever been recruited into a community project or tradition that you initially resisted, only to discover it made all the difference? What was it, and how did it transform your experience of that place?

Share your stories about the volunteer committees, the pageants, the potlucks, or the community events that turned strangers into neighbours and neighbours into family.

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If you are currently facing a major life transition or any other dramatic change in your circumstances, and you have no idea how you are going to cope, the good news is that the strategy presented in this book can help you, step by step, to improve your ability to handle the stress caused by change, even if you feel entirely powerless at the moment.

08/12/202508/12/2025

Countdown To Christmas Calendar Day 8

8 December 2025, 17 days to Christmas!

Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships

Today’s Story: The Cardamom Conspiracy

Maya stood in her minuscule apartment staring at the empty cardamom jar like it had personally betrayed her. Which, in a way, it had.

It was Christmas Eve. She was thirty-eight years old, a “mature student” (academic code for “your life fell apart so spectacularly you had to start over“), and she’d been in France for exactly four months. Long enough to know where the best boulangerie was. Not long enough to receive an invitation to any celebrations.

The recipe was her grandmother’s—handwritten on an index card so stained and worn the measurements were more memories than instructions. Cardamom cookies. The smell of her childhood Christmases, back when she’d had a job and a plan and hadn’t been “let go due to restructuring” which was corporate-speak for “we’ve decided you’re expendable.”

She’d bought all the ingredients yesterday. Checked the list twice. Somehow still managed not to buy cardamom, which was possibly the most on-brand thing that had happened to her this year.

Outside, Pau was doing its picturesque French Christmas thing—the Pyrenees snow-capped in the distance, lights twinkling on the Boulevard des Pyrénées, families heading to réveillon dinners. Inside, Maya was having a small crisis over a spice while her upstairs neighbours’ footsteps creaked overhead and their television soundtrack sounded like a dubbed version of Love Actually.

She could go to the store. Except it was 6 PM on Christmas Eve and everything was closing. She could make different cookies. Except these specific cookies were the entire point—her one attempt to make this silent apartment feel less like exile and more like choice.

She could also just give up, eat a jambon-beurre for dinner, and watch Christmas movies until she felt sufficiently sorry for herself to justify going to bed at 8 PM.

Or.

She looked at her apartment door. Directly across the hall, in 5B, her neighbour lived. The woman she’d seen exactly three times: once on the stairs, once collecting mail, once taking out recycling with the grim efficiency of someone who had opinions about proper sorting.

Mrs. Petrov. That’s what the name on the mailbox said. Somewhere in her seventies, steel-grey hair always in a bun, the kind of posture that suggested either ballet training or military service. She’d nodded at Maya precisely once. The nod had contained multitudes, none of them particularly welcoming.

Maya stood at her door for a full two minutes, conducting an internal negotiation with her inner critic.

She probably has cardamom. Old ladies always have spices.

She also probably wants to be left alone on Christmas Eve.

Or.

Or she might be lonely too.

What if she thinks you’re an idiot American who can’t plan ahead?

You ARE an idiot American who can’t plan ahead.

Helpful, thanks.

She knocked before she could talk herself out of it.

Silence. Then footsteps—measured, unhurried, the footsteps of someone who wasn’t expecting company and wasn’t particularly excited about the prospect.

The door opened.

Mrs. Petrov stood there in an apron dusted with flour, holding a wooden spoon like a weapon. Her expression suggested Maya had interrupted something important, possibly state secrets or a very serious conversation with her cat.

“Bonsoir,” Maya said, then switched to English because her French deserted her under pressure. “I’m so sorry to bother you. I’m your neighbour, Maya, from 5A, and I’m making cookies—trying to make cookies—and I’ve run out of cardamom and everything’s closed and I know this is incredibly presumptuous, but I was wondering if possibly you might have any I could borrow?”

She said all of this in one breath, like verbal diarrhoea, and immediately wanted to sink through the floor.

Mrs. Petrov stared at her. Maya couldn’t tell if the expression was judgment, irritation, or gas.

“Cardamom,” Mrs. Petrov said finally. Her English was accented, precise, with something Eastern European underneath. “For cookies.”

“Yes. My grandmother’s recipe. It’s—it’s stupid, I know, I should have checked, I’m terrible at planning, I just—” Maya heard herself spiralling steadily downwards and forced herself to stop. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

She started to back away.

“What kind of cookies?” Mrs. Petrov asked.

“Um. Cardamom. Swedish, actually. My grandmother was—”

“Swedish cardamom cookies. With pearl sugar on top?”

“Yes! Exactly those.”

Something shifted in Mrs. Petrov’s face. Not quite a smile, but a thawing. “I have cardamom. But you will ruin them if you use old cardamom. When did you buy yours?”

“…September?”

“Bozhe moy.” Mrs. Petrov shook her head, a gesture that seemed to encompass all of Maya’s poor life choices. “Come. I will give you fresh cardamom. Also, you will help me with koledna pitka because my hands are old and the dough is stubborn.”

Before Maya could process what was happening, she was inside Mrs. Petrov’s apartment.

It smelled like heaven. Yeast and butter and something warm and spiced that made Maya’s stomach growl audibly. The kitchen was small but immaculate, every surface covered with evidence of serious baking: cooling racks, mixing bowls, a massive round loaf of bread studded with walnuts and dried fruit.

“Sit,” Mrs. Petrov commanded, pointing at a chair. “You look like you haven’t eaten today.”

“I had coffee—”

“Coffee is not food. Americans. Pffft.” She said it with the weary tone of someone who’d been dealing with American nonsense for decades. “I am making koledna pitka. Bulgarian Christmas bread. You will eat, then you will take cardamom, then you will make your grandmother’s cookies properly.”

She cut a thick slice of the bread—still warm—and placed it in front of Maya with a small dish of honey and butter. The bread was golden, studded with walnuts and what looked like dried apricots, the crust crackling, the inside impossibly soft.

Maya took a bite and almost cried. Not because it tasted like her grandmother’s cookies—it didn’t. But because it tasted like someone’s grandmother’s something, and she hadn’t realised how desperately she’d been missing that.

“Good, yes?” Mrs. Petrov said, sitting across from her with her own slice.

“It’s incredible.”

“Koledna pitka. Christmas bread. In Bulgaria, we make it Christmas Eve, hide coin inside for luck. Here in France, I make it anyway. No one to share with usually, but the bread doesn’t care.”

She said it matter-of-factly, but Maya heard the loneliness underneath.

“How long have you been in France?” Maya asked.

“Forty-three years. Came in 1981, from Sofia. My husband was French, worked in Pau. I spoke no French, knew no one, understood nothing.” She broke off a piece of bread, dipped it in honey. “First Christmas, I cried for three days. Tried to make banitsa, burned it because French ovens are different. Sat alone in apartment smaller than this, eating burned banitsa, thinking I had made terrible mistake.”

“What happened?”

“Neighbour knocked. Old French woman, very proper, very stern. She could smell the burning, thought maybe I had set the flat on fire. Instead, I was crying over pastry.” Mrs. Petrov smiled—actually smiled, a real one that transformed her entire face. “She invited me for réveillon. Her family, twelve people, all speaking French too fast to understand. I sat there like deaf person, smiling, nodding. But they fed me, gave me wine, taught me French Christmas songs. And that woman—Madame Dubois—she became my French teacher, my friend, my family here.”

She looked at Maya directly, her eyes sharp but kind. “You are alone for Christmas, yes?”

Maya nodded, not trusting her voice.

“Your family is where?”

“California. I couldn’t afford the flight. New student budget.” She tried to smile. “Plus I got laid off from my job six months ago and I’m still kind of… figuring things out. Coming here to study felt like either a great idea or the worst decision of my life. Jury’s still out.”

“Ahh.” Mrs. Petrov stood, started pulling down spice jars from a cabinet. “You are running away.”

“I prefer ‘strategic relocation.'”

“You are running away,” Mrs. Petrov repeated, but not unkindly. “Is okay. I ran away too. Sometimes running away is just running toward something you cannot see yet.”

She placed a jar of cardamom on the table—the good kind, whole pods in a glass jar. “Fresh. From the Indian shop on Rue Serviez. You grind yourself, yes? Better flavour.”

“I don’t have a grinder—”

Mrs. Petrov produced a mortar and pestle like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. “You grind here. I teach you. Then you make cookies here, in oven that works properly, not your terrible American apartment oven that heats up and cools down too fast.”

“I couldn’t possibly—”

“You think I want to eat the entire koledna pitka alone? You will make cookies, I will make banitsa, we will eat together. This is how Christmas works.”

It wasn’t a question.

For the next three hours, Maya ground cardamom, learned that Swedish cookies and Bulgarian bread had more in common than she’d thought, and listened to Mrs. Petrov’s stories about Sofia in winter, about learning French, about Madame Dubois and the family that adopted a lonely Bulgarian woman forty years ago.

The kitchen filled with the smell of cardamom and butter and yeast and something else—the particular warmth that comes from cooking with someone who understands what it means to be far from home.

Maya’s cookies came out perfect—golden, fragrant, studded with pearl sugar that Mrs. Petrov produced from her improbably well-stocked pantry. They ate them warm with strong coffee while Mrs. Petrov’s banitsa cooled, and somewhere between the second cookie and the third story about Madame Dubois, Maya realised she was laughing. Actually laughing, for the first time in weeks.

“Your grandmother,” Mrs. Petrov said, examining a cookie critically. “She was good baker.”

“She was. She died two years ago.”

“Ahh. So you make cookies to remember her.”

“To feel less alone, maybe.”

Mrs. Petrov nodded slowly. “We carry our grandmothers in recipes. In bread, in cookies, in things we make with our hands.” She placed another cookie on Maya’s plate. “But you cannot eat cookies alone in sad apartment. This is not what grandmothers want. They want you to share, to make new family, to keep living.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Is what Madame Dubois taught me. She died ten years ago, but I still make koledna pitka every year. Still invite lonely people who knock on my door asking for cardamom.” Her eyes crinkled. “Still believe that Christmas is for finding family wherever you are.”

They sat in comfortable silence, eating cookies and bread, while outside, Pau celebrated Christmas Eve and inside, two women from different continents and different generations shared the universal language of butter, flour, and generosity.

“Next week,” Mrs. Petrov said, standing to brew more coffee, “you come for dinner. I teach you to make proper banitsa. Also, you will meet my friend Simone from downstairs—French teacher, very bossy, will improve your French whether you want her to or not.”

“I’d like that.”

She poured coffee, placed a cup in front of Maya. Maya wrapped her hands around the warm cup, feeling something unknot in her chest. “Thank you. For the cardamom. For everything.”

“Nishto. Is nothing. Is Christmas.” Mrs. Petrov raised her cup. “Chestita Koleda. Merry Christmas, Maya from California, who bakes vintage Christmas cookies.”

“Merry Christmas, Mrs. Petrov, who saves Americans with incomplete spice collections.”

They clinked cups while church bells rang across Pau, and somewhere between the bells and the bread and the overwhelming smell of cardamom, Maya realised this was exactly what her grandmother would have wanted: not perfect traditions recreated in isolation, but new traditions built with whoever happened to be there, sharing whatever they had.

The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan

Friendship also means setting boundaries to protect your energy, especially during challenging life transitions. It’s okay to say no to invitations or expectations that don’t align with your well-being. True friends will understand and respect your needs.

This Christmas, give yourself permission to prioritise what feels right for you. Saying no isn’t about shutting people out—it’s about making space for the connections and activities that truly matter.

Today, knock on a neighbour’s door—literally or metaphorically—and ask for help with something small. Borrow sugar. Ask for directions. Request a restaurant recommendation. Admit you don’t know how something works. Be the person who’s willing to be vulnerable first. Worst case scenario: They say no, you feel awkward for three minutes, life continues.
Best case scenario: You discover that your stern neighbour is actually lonely too, that asking for help is how friendship starts, that the people who seem most intimidating are often the ones who most understand what it means to start over in a strange place. You end up with cardamom, Christmas bread, stories about Sofia in winter, and an invitation to dinner next week, where you’ll meet your neighbour’s friend who will improve your French whether you want her to or not.

Have you ever knocked on a neighbour’s door for help—or had someone knock on yours? What happened, and did it change your relationship? What’s your “cardamom moment”—a time when running out of something small led to something bigger and more meaningful?

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06/12/202506/12/2025

Countdown to Christmas Calendar – Day 7

December 7, 2025 – 19 Days until Christmas

Theme: The Importance of Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships during Difficult Times

Today’s Story: Au Café des Platanes

Friends as Chosen Family

The air outside the Café des Platanes smelled like caramelised sugar, finest dark roast coffee, and old radiators working overtime against the sudden cold. A hand-lettered sign propped up in the window read “Atelier d’Écriture Créative—Tout Les Mardis à 19h” with a small fountain pen sketched beneath it.

Outside, Natalie was trying to keep her footing on the treacherous cobblestones. Through the steamed-up glass, she could see four women already seated at a corner table. Behind her, a group of laughing people was setting up the Christmas market on the town’s central square—wooden chalets strung with garlands, the smell of roasting chestnuts drifting on the cold air, someone testing speakers with a crackly recording of French carols.

She clutched her A4-sized notebook, containing a random collection of half-finished stories, against her chest like a shield.

You don’t have to go in, her brain offered helpfully. You could walk to the boulangerie, buy a croissant aux amandes, go home to your rented apartment, and curl up on the sofa with your cat and a chocolat chaud.

But her sister in London had been annoyingly insistent during their last video call: “You need to get out more. Mingle. Meet people. Join some groups. You moved to France to start a new chapter, not to become a hermit in a French flat, however cosy and comfortable.”

Natalie pushed open the door.

The brass bell above it jangled. Heads turned. The café was pleasantly warm, despite the struggling heaters, all three-legged wooden tables and mismatched wooden chairs, strings of white lights woven around exposed beams. The room was dominated by a huge Christmas tree decorated with vintage postcards. A dog was fast asleep in a basket next to the roaring fireplace. French jazz played softly from speakers that had probably been installed in 1977.

“Bonsoir, Madame et bienvenue!” A woman with silver-streaked hair in a violet scarf waved enthusiastically. “Vous êtes là pour l’atelier de l’écriture? Sorry, you’re here for the writing? I’m Patricia. British, been here twelve years, still can’t properly conjugate a single irregular verb. Sit, sit—Marc will bring you something to drink.”

Marc, presumably the owner, appeared with a knowing smile and a café crème.

The other women introduced themselves: Amara, French-Senegalese, with box braids and paint-stained fingers, who’d recently moved down from Paris; Jin, Korean-American, speaking careful French with a perfect accent that suggested expensive language lessons; Sophie, French, roughly Natalie’s age, wearing a sweatshirt that said “J’ai des sentiments mitigés” and holding a large glass of dark red wine; and Lisa, Austrian, who still missed her children who had moved to Vienna and Stuttgart ten years ago.

“I’m Natalie. American. Moved here three months ago.” She settled into a chair that was actually comfortable, unlike the avarage plastic torture device in every community centre she’d ever entered in the States.

“Right,” Patricia said, adding sugar to her espresso with the dedication of someone who’d given up pretending to like it bitter, “who brought something to share?”

Silence. Outside, someone was hanging lights in the plane trees. The Christmas market music drowned out the café’s jazz—an accordion version of “Petit Papa Noël.”

“Right,” Patricia said. “First meeting nerves. perfectly understandable. Maybe we should start with why we’re here? I’ll go first. I’m recently widowed, my children in Manchester think I should sell this house and move into one of those ghastly retirement communities, and I’d rather eat my own boots. I’ve always wanted to write, but spent forty years convinced I had nothing interesting to say. Then Roger died last Christmas Eve—horrible timing—and suddenly I found I had rather a lot to say.”

The silence shifted—still dense, but less defensive. Someone’s phone buzzed. The dog in the basket snored.

“I’m going through a divorce,” Natalie heard herself say. “I used to write. Before I got married and somehow forgot I was a person with interests beyond making dinner reservations and pretending my husband’s jokes were funny.”

Sophie raised her glass of wine in a sardonic toast. “Similar situation, different catastrophe. Broke up with my boyfriend of seven years. He kept the Paris apartment, and I got the ancestral house in the countryside that needs new plumbing and possibly an exorcist. I know exactly four people here: my notaire, my pharmacist, the woman at the tabac, and the man who delivers my Amazon packages and definitely judges my life choices.”

Jin laughed softly. “Corporate burnout. Silicon Valley tech startup, eighty-hour weeks, stock options I never cashed because I was too busy building someone else’s dream. Had a panic attack during a funding presentation, decided France sounded ‘interesting,’ applied for a skills visa. My mother in Seoul is thrilled I’m finally ‘finding myself.’ She hopes it’s a phase.”

“Cancer,” Amara said simply, and the word landed like a stone in still water. Marc, delivering more coffee, squeezed her shoulder gently. “Courage, ma belle.” She smiled up at him. “Finished treatment in September. Everyone keeps congratulating me like I won a competition, but mostly I feel like someone took me apart and put me back together without looking at the instruction manual. Missing pieces, extra pieces in weird places. I’m trying to figure out who this version is.”

Lisa was last. She folded her hands around her steaming tea—something herbal that smelled like Christmas spices. “Empty nest. Both children long grown and gone, living in cities I can barely afford to visit. Husband and I looked at each other across the breakfast table six months ago and realised we’d forgotten how to talk about anything except the children. So I came here—this was my grandmother’s house, left to me. He stayed in Austria. We’re… figuring it out.”

Patricia looked around the table at this mismatched collection of women. “Well,” she said, a smile crinkling the corners of her eyes. “at least we have lots of life experience. Writers need material. Nothing says ‘compelling narrative’ like an existential crisis during the most wonderful time of the year.”

Someone giggled nervously. Soon they were all laughing, with relief mostly, at not having to pretend everything was magical just because there were Christmas lights everywhere.

“Right,” Patricia said, pulling out a battered Moleskine. “I brought a short story. It’s probably dreadful. It’s about a woman who ‘accidentally’ destroys her husband’s antique cricket bat collection.”

“I need to hear this immediately,” Sophie said, refilling her wine glass.

Soon, they developed habits.

Patricia always arrived first, claiming the corner table near the radiator. Marc would have their usual drinks ready—café crème for Natalie, espresso for Patricia, dark Madiran wine for Sophie (“An acquired taste,” she insisted), ginger tea for Lisa, and hot, melted chocolate for Amara, who said after chemo everything else tasted like metal. Jin brought pastries—sometimes kouign-amann from the Breton bakery, sometimes pain aux raisins, once an entire galette des rois, even though it was barely December. Amara sketched in the margins while people read, creating tiny illustrations of their stories. Lisa had started bringing stollen from the German bakery one town over. Sophie appointed herself sommelier, bringing different wines each week and explaining their terroir with the seriousness of someone who’d grown up in wine country. Natalie, who’d barely spoken that first week, now brought printed copies of her work, her confidence growing like a seed tentatively reaching toward the light.

They wrote about everything. Amara wrote speculative fiction where women with bodies that had betrayed them transformed into creatures with wings. Jin wrote sharp, funny essays about the tech world that had chewed her up. Lisa wrote aching pieces about the rooms filled with ghosts her children left behind. Sophie wrote experimental poetry that made no sense grammatically in either French or English but somehow captured exactly what heartbreak felt like at 3 AM in an empty house that creaked with loneliness. Patricia was working on a novel about a woman who started by destroying her husband’s cricket bat collection and then moved on to ever more ambitious targets.

“It’s very therapeutic,” Patricia explained.

“It’s slightly concerning,” Jin said.

“Et alors?” Patricia teased.

Natalie wrote about divorce, but sideways—stories about women who woke up in different countries, living different lives, in different dimensions where they’d made different choices. Stories about becoming unrecognisable to yourself in foreign languages.

“These are good,” Amara said after Natalie finished reading one evening. Outside, the Christmas market was still in full swing—carousel music drifting across the square, the smell of vin chaud and croustade, children shrieking with joy near the ice rink they’d set up. “Like, actually good. Vraiment. You should submit this somewhere.”

“Oh, I don’t know—”

“Submit it,” Sophie said firmly. “We’re not doing that thing where we diminish our own work because we’re women who were socialised to apologise for existing, in three languages.”

The meetings stretched longer. Till eight, then nine, then Marc would finally start stacking chairs around them, and they’d realise it was past eleven and he wanted to go home. They exchanged phone numbers. Started a WhatsApp group that soon featured the best writing memes, recipe exchanges and 2 AM messages like “cannot sleep, obsessing about mortality, someone send cat videos.”

When Natalie’s ex-husband got engaged, she texted the group at 11 PM: Is it normal to want to set things on fire? Asking for a friend.

Five responses came within minutes: Very normal (Patricia) What things? Be specific (Jin) I’m bringing wine (Sophie) Coming over with cookies straight-from-the-oven (Lisa) Already in my car, be there in 10 (Amara)

They all showed up at her flat. Brought wine, melt-in-the-mouth cookies, and Patricia’s latest chapter, which involved increasingly creative uses of sporting equipment as murder weapons.

“I’m fine,” Natalie said, which was a lie, and they all knew it.

“Bien sûr,” Lisa said, opening the wine. “That’s why we’re here. To be fine together.”

They stayed until 2 AM, reading terrible reviews of her ex-husband’s favourite restaurant aloud in dramatic voices, workshop-editing Patricia’s murder scene (“More visceral! More conviction!”), and letting Natalie cry when she finally stopped pretending she wasn’t going to. Outside, everything was silent except for the wind whipping around the bare branches of sleeping trees and the distant sound of church bells marking the hour.

On Christmas Eve, they met at Patricia’s house, which smelled of pine needles, woodsmoke, and pain d’épices. Candles flickered on every surface. And over the fireplace, stockings hung—six of them, each in a different fabric, clearly handmade.

“I may have gotten carried away,” Patricia said, catching Natalie’s look.

Each stocking had a name stitched on it: Patricia. Amara. Jin (in Hangul). Sophie. Lisa. Natalie.

Something in Natalie’s chest cracked open.

They settled into Patricia’s living room with champagne and sablés and the particular comfort of a space warmed by both fire and friendship.

They talked about the year, about survival, about the strange gift of falling apart in good company in a foreign country where even buying stamps was an adventure.

“I joined this group,” Natalie said quietly, “because I was desperately lonely and my sister threatened to fly here and physically drag me to social events. I thought I was coming to practice writing in my second language.”

“Plot twist,” Sophie said. “Tu as trouvé une famille.”

“Very Hallmark Channel of us,” Jin added.

“I’m serious. A year ago, I didn’t know any of you. I was married and miserable in a different country. I thought moving to France would fix me, or at least give me a better choice of cheese while I figured my life out. And instead I found—” She gestured helplessly at the room, the stockings, the faces watching her with understanding from four different continents. “This.”

“Through the universal language of the written word,” Patricia said. Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed midnight.

Outside, church bells rang Christmas Eve into being. Marc texted the group chat a photo of the café’s Christmas tree with the message “Joyeux Noël, mes écrivaines préférées,” and somewhere in the warmth of that room was every good reason to keep showing up, keep trying, keep believing that the best things in life often come disguised as Tuesday night writing groups in cafés that smell like coffee and caramel and hope.

“Mardi prochain?” Lisa asked.

“Mardi prochain,” they agreed.

Today, join one group—online or in person—centred around something you genuinely care about, even if (especially if) you’re going through a difficult time and even if it’s in a language you’re still learning. Book club. Writing group. Hiking club. Cooking class. Language exchange. Art workshop. Choir. Whatever sparks even mild interest.
Worst case scenario: You spend a few Tuesday evenings with people who share one interest, stumble through conversations in mixed languages, and decide it’s not for you. Best case scenario: You walk into a café and walk out six months later with five people from four continents who have stockings with your name on them, who show up at midnight when you’re falling apart, who become the family you didn’t know you were building while you thought you were just learning to write better dialogue in your second language. Tuesday after Tuesday, story after story, crisis after crisis, until one day you realise you’re not alone anymore in this foreign country and you haven’t been for a while, and the word “home” suddenly means something different than it did when you arrived.

Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan

The holidays can highlight the importance of family, especially if you’re going struggling through a major life crisis, but for some, traditional family relationships may feel strained or distant. This is where friends can become your chosen family—a group of people who truly see, accept, and support you.

Maybe take a moment to appreciate the friends who’ve stepped into that role in your life? These relationships are a testament to the idea that family isn’t always about blood—it’s about love, loyalty, and shared experiences.

How well do you know your new friends? If you and a new friend are really compatible? For my Radical Renaissance students, I have created a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions about frienship, as I firmly believe a strong support group is invaluable in a crisis. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. I’ll also add you to my newsletter list, though you can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time. Included:

– How well do you know your Friends? Quiz

– What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz

– 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and

– 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend

Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox!

retreatssouthoffrance

Guiding others to live a purpose-powered, low-stress, savouring life during retreats on the Camino de Santiago in the sunblessed south of France. ⇓

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05/12/202507/12/2025

Countdown to Christmas Day 6

December 6, 2025 – 19 Days to Christmas

A Christmas Gift

A Christmas Story: The Spa Day That Went Sideways

For Lesley

By the time Claire Dubois signed her divorce papers on December 18th, she felt as if she had spent five years inside a malfunctioning emotional blender—one of those noisy, lid-jumping contraptions with several warning labels and a tendency to splatter carrot puree on the ceiling. So when her three closest friends—Sophie, Marianne, and Elodie—announced they were taking her to Bagnères-de-Bigorre for a spa day to celebrate her newfound freedom, Claire didn’t protest. She needed pampering. She needed steam, serenity, and something resembling a full nervous system reboot before facing Christmas dinner with her well-meaning but relentlessly nosy family.

The drive to the Pyrenees felt like slipping inside a snow globe. Fresh powder dusted the mountain peaks like royal icing on a gingerbread landscape. The air smelled of pine resin, wood smoke, and cold stone. Christmas lights twinkled from the windows of wooden chalets along the road—reds and golds reflecting off the snow—and somewhere in the distance a church bell chimed Adeste Fideles, muffled by the crisp mountain air. Roadside vendors sold roasted chestnuts and vin chaud from steaming pots. By the time the four women arrived at the thermal spa—its elegant stone façade rising out of the valley, draped in garlands of pine and white lights—Claire felt her shoulders finally unclench.

Which was, of course, the moment the day started slipping sideways.

Inside the spa, a calming soundtrack of flutes and trickling water played, occasionally interrupted by instrumental versions of Christmas carols that made “Silent Night” sound like meditation music. Miniature Christmas trees dotted the reception area, their ornaments catching the soft amber light. Each locker offered a neatly folded white cocoon of terry cloth. Sophie’s and Marianne’s looked plush enough to double as duvets. Claire’s XXXS version looked like it had shrunk in the wash—or been designed for an unusually modest elf. She tried to put it on anyway. It wrapped around her torso with all the generosity of a disgruntled dish towel. Her left hip staged an immediate escape attempt. Elodie took one look and doubled over laughing, loud enough to attract stares from two indignant retirees in matching terry cloth, attempting to preserve the sanctity of spa silence. Claire couldn’t help it—she had to laugh too, the kind of laughter that bubbled up unexpectedly like champagne.

She marched to the reception, one hand clamped across her chest to preserve her dignity (and modesty, although why she bothers…), the other attempting to hold the robe closed. The receptionist, without even blinking, sighed as though this was a daily occurrence and murmured, “Oh. Yes. Er, our apologies.” She disappeared into a back room and returned with a robe so enormous Claire could have hosted a community meeting inside it. But it fit, and it was warm, and smelled faintly of cinnamon. Disaster averted.

Robe secured, the four friends floated toward the outdoor thermal pool. Steam rose in soft curtains from the turquoise water, backlit by strings of white lights wound through the surrounding pine trees. Snowflakes drifted from the grey winter sky, melting the instant they touched the surface. The air smelled of minerals and eucalyptus, with an undertone of mulled wine from the spa bar, a scent suggesting festive promise. Claire lowered herself into the water and felt it envelop her like a warm exhale from the earth itself.

“This is bliss,” she sighed, leaning back. “This I could get used to.”

The universe, hearing her, chuckled and said, “Hold my spiced cider.”

Just as Claire began to relax, a sudden roar erupted behind her. Before she could turn around, something flew across the water. Her robe. The huge, heavy, comforting robe she had laid neatly on the pool’s edge was now spinning in the water like a squid being sucked toward the filtration intake. She lunged for it. She missed. People turned. A few applauded. The lifeguard—wearing a Santa hat over his regulation cap—sighed, retrieved a long pole, and began fishing for it with resigned professionalism. When he finally hauled it out, limp, dripping and drowned, the receptionist materialised at her side with another, working hard to keep her face straight.

Her friends were laughing so hard they could barely stay afloat, which made Claire laugh too—big, helpless, ridiculous laughter that made her cheeks hurt. The kind she hadn’t felt in far too long.

They eventually staggered their way to the hammam, decorated with a small garland of eucalyptus and holly above the entrance. Inside, the steam was so thick Claire couldn’t see the bench in front of her, the walls around her, or the limits of her own personal space. Voices echoed strangely in the fog, disembodied. Someone murmured “over here,” and Claire, imagining she was moving toward Marianne, took a confident step forward, reached out, and sat down.

On a stranger.

A very startled, very unclothed stranger.

His shocked gasp cut through the steam like a foghorn. A moment later, the steam parted enough for Claire to see his horrified eyes, wide as poached eggs. Claire yelped, jumped up, slipped on condensation, and skidded across the tile floor with the helpless momentum of a baby deer encountering ice for the first time. Somewhere behind her, her friends dissolved again into uncontrollable laughter—the sort that suggested they might need medical attention.

The man coughed. “Is okay,” he wheezed. “I think… you break no bones?”

“My dignity,” Claire said, “is in traction.”

After the hammam debacle, they attempted lunch. The spa café smelled promising: roasted chestnuts, mulled wine, something buttery and cinnamon-spiced. A small Christmas tree stood in the corner, its lights twinkling hopefully. But their soup—described enthusiastically by the waitress as “rustic, warming, a heritage recipe from the mountains”—arrived as a beige, flavourless puddle that somehow managed to be the exact opposite of every comforting winter meal promised by the season. They seasoned it. They stirred it. They attempted to coax character out of it. Nothing helped. Sophie said, “It tastes like my last relationship: bland, lukewarm, and profoundly disappointing.” Finally, Elodie announced, “It tastes like beige had a personality and lost it halfway through therapy. Beyond redemption.”

At sunset, they finally made their way to the rooftop hot tub. Steam curled into the cold winter sky. The Pyrenean peaks blushed pink and peach as daylight faded, their snow-covered slopes glowing like they’d been dusted with silver. In the distance, church bells chimed. Claire felt herself melt into the warm water, into the moment, in the presence of the three women who had held her up through the darkest season of her life.

“I thought today was supposed to be calming,” she smiled.

“Oh, it was never going to be calm,” Sophie replied. “We don’t do calm. We do… memorable.”

“Thank you,” Claire said. “For today. For all of it. A Christmas gift I’ll never forget. For making sure I didn’t spend Christmas week crying while binging on not-yet-discounted chocolate.”

“Even though everything went wrong?” Sophie asked.

“Because everything went wrong. My marriage was about everything going right. Perfect plans, perfect image, perfect relationship. Perfect Christmases with matching sweaters and colour-coordinated gift wrap. And it was hell.” She paused, watching a snowflake land on her finger and melt. “This was about everything going wrong. And it was perfect.”

They clinked plastic spa cups of spicy herbal tea together.

Marianne proposed, “To the worst spa day ever.”

“To freedom,” Sophie toasted.

“To questionable spa etiquette,” Elodie added.

“To friendship,” Claire whispered. “

Today’s post in 2024

Today, be the friend who shows up when needed. Don’t wait for the perfect moment or the perfect Christmas gift. Just show up—and create the messy, imperfect memory.
Worst case scenario: Nothing goes to plan, someone sits on a stranger in a hammam, and you all eat terrible soup while questioning your life choices.
Best case scenario: Years later, when your friend thinks about that difficult Christmas, they won’t remember the pain as much as they remember you—showing up with ridiculous robes and refusing to let them face it alone, turning the worst spa day ever into the moment they realised that love looks like friends who stay through no matter what goes wrong.

The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan

Christmas reminds us of the joy of giving, but sometimes, we hesitate. In our friendships, we often hold back. We hesitate before reaching out, before offering help, before being the first to say “I’m thinking of you.” We worry about seeming needy, or too much, or like we care more than they do.

True generosity in friendship isn’t transactional. It’s not a ledger that needs balancing by year-end. It’s the quiet decision to reach out simply because you want to—because someone matters to you, because connection itself is the reward, because giving from genuine affection needs no return on investment.

Forget the perfect Christmas gift. A small act of kindness—a thoughtful message at 11 PM because something reminded you of them, a shared memory that says “remember when we laughed until we couldn’t breathe?”, a surprise gesture that requires no occasion beyond “I saw this and thought of you”—these moments carry more weight than we realise. They brighten someone’s day in ways you might never witness.

This Christmas season, be the friend who reaches out first.

Sometimes the greatest gift we give is letting someone know they’re worth the effort.

What questions can you ask to get to know a new friend? How do you know if you and a new friend are really compatible? I have created a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions to help you do just that. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. I’ll also add you to my newsletter list, though you can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time. Included:

– How well do you know your Friends? Quiz

– What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz

– 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and

– 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend

Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox!

Today’s (Other) Blog Post

High-Functioning Burnout Symptoms: I Looked Fine on the Outside, But Inside I Was Falling Apart

4 responses to “Countdown to Christmas Day 6”

Riet

06/12/2025

Murphy’s law can help you through a difficult time, certainly when surrounded by friends in this sort of situation and the laughter can’t be held back.
1. Margaretha Montagu
  
  06/12/2025
  
  I’m so glad the comment section finally works!!! Indeed,as far as I can make out, Murphy was an optimist. 😉
Ginster

06/12/2025

“Women’s friendships are like a renewable source of power.” Jane Fonda and she is right and shows it.
1. Margaretha Montagu
  
  06/12/2025
  
  Endlessly renewable. “We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.” Sheryl Sandberg

05/12/202506/12/2025

Countdown to Christmas Calendar Day 5

December 5, 2025 – 20 Days to Christmas

Relocation to Paris

Today’s Story: Priya’s Paris Relocation

The moment Priya stepped into the “3ème Soirée Annuelle de Networking & Canapés de Noël”—an event title that sounded like a hostile takeover of her free time, now with added French pretension—she knew she’d made a mistake.

The Marais loft glowed with fairy lights strung between exposed wooden beams, and smelled of mulled wine and those expensive beeswax candles that people light when they are trying too hard. Through the tall windows, she could see the December drizzle turning the cobblestones below into dark mirrors. People were already clustering in tight conversational pods, their laughter too loud, their talk bouncing between English and French as they discussed Q4 projections and something called “strategic disruptions pendant les fêtes.”

A man in a blazer, the exact shade of a bruised plum, wearing a tiny Santa hat at a jaunty angle, materialised beside her. He looked like a Christmas ornament that had achieved sentience and a six-figure salary at a consulting firm.

“Champagne, ou peut-être un ‘Mistletini’—it’s 90% gin and 10% potential indigestion!” he chirped in that particular Franco-English accent that suggested international business school and expensive ski holidays.

She took a glass. Bubbles hit her nose, making her sneeze. Velvet Plum Blazer took a quick step back. “Santé,” he said, then vanished faster than he appeared.

Priya wished she could vanish too—maybe dissolve into the mist outside and reform somewhere less aggressively festive.

Don’t overthink it, she told herself. You’re a grown woman. You’ve survived corporate take-overs and layoffs, three terrible bosses, and that time you accidentally replied-all to a company-wide email about your cat’s digestive issues. You can survive two hours of forced merriment in a foreign city where you’re still not entirely sure which bises situations require two cheek-kisses or three. Or four?

She executed a tactical retreat to the groaning food table—her natural habitat at any social event—and formed a strategic alliance with a platter of mini-quiches shaped like tiny wreaths and some suspiciously fancy foie gras on toast points that probably cost more than her monthly rent.

She was chewing thoughtfully (or buying time—hard to say) when she heard it. The question. The social landmine. The six words that could instantly turn a festive gathering into an existential dread-fest.

“So, what do you do?”

Her jaw froze mid-chew. She turned to find a smiling woman wearing a sweater featuring a reindeer in an Eiffel Tower scarf—the kind of knitwear that announced “I’m whimsical but also serious about networking.” She had the festive confidence of someone who owned a separate set of Christmas napkins and knew exactly which arrondissement had the best Christmas markets.

Priya tried to stall, pointing at the quiche in her mouth. The woman waited, her smile unwavering with that particularly French patience that feels both generous and vaguely judgmental.

Arrrgh.

This was where she usually deployed one of her practised evasions: “It’s complicated,” or “I’m between things,” or the magical word “Consulting”—a word that meant absolutely nothing but usually impressed people into silence, especially when said in Paris, where everyone claimed to be consulting about something, at any given time.

But tonight, with the rain softly tapping against the windows and the distant bells of Notre-Dame chiming the hour, she was tired. Tired of pretending, tired of dodging, tired of shaping herself into something acceptable for strangers who probably wouldn’t remember her name by the time the accordion version of “Douce Nuit” ended.

She gulped down the quiche.

“I am currently a professional consumer of artisanal holiday snacks,” Priya deadpanned.

The woman blinked.

Priya considered spontaneously combusting on the spot, or possibly throwing herself into the Seine, whichever would be quicker.

Then the woman laughed—a real, booming, un-corporate laugh that made three people stop discussing their stock options and smoothly move on to the best boulangeries in the 16th.

She lifted her glass. “Welcome to the club. I quit my job as a ‘Chief Optimisation Strategist’ to become a ‘Senior Executive of Existential Dread.’ Relocated to Paris, thinking the wine and cheese would fix me. Jury’s still out.”

Priya exhaled so sharply her bangs fluttered. “You did?”

“Yup,” Reindeer-sweater Woman said. “After fourteen years of pretending I loved optimising regional workflow systems. My soul escaped by faking its own death and mailing me a postcard from Provence. It said ‘Bisous‘ and nothing else.”

Priya snorted. “Félicitations to that.”

They clinked glasses and migrated toward a quieter corner near a potted plant and a window overlooking the rain-slicked street below, where the Christmas lights reflected in puddles like scattered stars. A man in a beret walked past with a baguette under his arm—so stereotypically Parisian that Priya wondered if he was performance art.

“I’m Maya, by the way.”

“Priya.”

“So,” Maya said, sliding into a vintage velvet armchair with the elegance of someone abandoning all pretence, “how’s your quarter-life, mid-life, two-thirds-life crisis going? Mine is currently focused by the terrifying realisation that I don’t know how to do anything but make pivot tables. Turns out that’s not a transferable skill for Parisian dinner parties.”

Priya laughed, startled. “Honestly? I think I’m in the renegotiation period of the ceasefire between Me and My Expectations. I’m demanding better terms. Possibly in French, for dramatic effect.”

Maya raised her glass. “To demanding better terms. À nos projets flous et terrifiants.”

Priya settled beside her. The chair sighed under the weight of her honesty. Outside, the city twinkled—the Eiffel Tower doing its hourly sparkle show in the distance, because even infrastructure here was dramatic. She took a breath. “I thought leaving my job would make things clearer. Like the universe would hand me a neatly labelled folder: ‘Priya’s New Purpose—Action Items Inside.’ Instead, I’m… here. In Paris. At a party. Eating expensive quiche and pretending I understand when people switch mid-sentence to French.”

“I get it,” Maya said. “I spent ten years working toward a corner office. Then I finally got it, sat in the leather chair, looked out over the city and thought, ‘Ah. I think I might have made a horrible, irreversible mistake.’ So I moved to Paris, thinking geographical relocation would solve existential problems. Spoiler: it doesn’t. But the bread is better.”

“Ten years for one uncomfortable chair?”

Maya nodded solemnly. “It was ergonomic, which is corporate code for ‘will slowly destroy your spine in a very expensive way.’ The Paris version has better stuffing but the same soul-crushing vibe.”

Something warm started expanding in Priya’s chest, competing with the mulled wine. “It’s just… everyone else seems so certain. I tell people I left my job, and they congratulate me like I just climbed Everest. But then they ask what’s next, and when I say ‘I don’t know,’ they stare at me like I’ve confessed to burning down the Galeries Lafayette Christmas display.”

Maya tilted her head, her reindeer-Eiffel earrings swaying. “Priya, look around. This entire place is filled with people pretending they have A PLAN. Some do. But a lot of them are one minor inconvenience—like running out of champagne or discovering their Navigo pass expired—away from Googling ‘What’s my real purpose in life?‘ just like the rest of us.”

Priya followed her gaze. The confidently networking people looked a little different now—less intimidating. Slightly panicked, even, beneath the curated glow of ambition and the blinking Santa hats perched atop perfectly styled French haircuts.

“Huh,” Priya said. “Maybe none of us really knows what we’re doing. We’re just doing it in nicer cities.”

They fell into the kind of conversation that feels like slipping on warm, well-worn slippers—cozy, unpretentious, safe. They talked about old dreams, lost passions, the terrifying thrill of blank calendars, and the existential dread of absent LinkedIn notifications. Maya confessed she’d been in Paris for three months and still couldn’t figure out which day her building’s concierge speaks to people. Priya admitted she’d cried in a boulangerie last week because she couldn’t remember the word for croissant(?!) and just pointed desperately while the baker looked confused and slightly concerned.

They shared their fears, too.

“What if I never figure it out?” Priya whispered.

Maya shrugged softly. “Figuring it out might be a tad… overrated. The French have been philosophically unsure about everything for centuries, and they seem fine. Well, fine-ish. They have 300 varieties of cheese to help them cope.”

That landed somewhere deep. Priya swallowed.

“I watch a lot of TED Talks,” Maya said dryly. “Two and a half, and suddenly I’m Yoda. Un Yoda parisien avec un béret rouge.”

They sat in companionable silence, two strangers who’d become something more—companions in the strange, brave wilderness between endings and beginnings, sitting in a Marais loft while the city glittered outside and accordion music drifted up from somewhere below.

Later, as Priya stepped out into the cold December night, her breath made soft clouds in the air. The street glimmered with rain and reflected Christmas lights. A couple hurried past sharing an umbrella, laughing. The smell of roasting chestnuts drifted from a corner stand. Somewhere, church bells chimed.

Priya didn’t have all the answers, but she had one honest conversation under her belt and the phone number of someone who understood what it felt like to be spectacularly uncertain in a beautiful city.

For tonight, that felt like enough.

The Make Friends and Maintain Friendships Masterplan

We often under-rate relocation as a life transition. I have had to relocate several times. I know what it takes to survive: friends you can depend on.

Making new friends after a relocation isn’t about replacing the people you left behind—it’s about building the infrastructure you need to survive and thrive in your new reality. Your best friend from your old location knows your history, your inside jokes, the person you were before everything changed, and that connection is irreplaceable—nurture it fiercely through regular calls, visits, and the kind of texts that pick up mid-conversation like no time has passed. They can’t, however, bring you soup when you’re sick at 2 AM, can’t meet you for an impromptu coffee when you’re spiralling, can’t introduce you to their dentist or help you figure out which grocery store has the best bread.

New friends become your on-the-ground support system—the people who help you build a life where you actually live, not just where you used to live. You need both: the deep roots of old friendship that remind you who you are, and the new connections that help you figure out who you’re becoming. One gives you continuity; the other gives you community.

Christmas events, community gatherings, or even online spaces are filled with opportunities to connect. Every friendship starts with a simple introduction. The barista you see every morning, the neighbour you exchange nods with, or someone in your extended social circle could become a meaningful connection if you’re open to the possibility.

New friendships are a reminder that life always offers fresh beginnings, even during times of change. You don’t have to navigate transitions alone—there are people out there ready to walk alongside you. Making friends and maintaining friendships is one of the subjects we’ll address during my 3-6 month mentoring program, the Radical Renaissance Protocol.

Today, say yes to one social event that feels uncomfortable or outside your comfort zone—especially if you’re new somewhere or going through a transition.
Show up even when you’d rather stay home. Go to the networking thing, the expat meetup, the random invitation from an acquaintance. Join local and regional Facebook groups.
Worst case scenario: You waste a couple of hours.
Best case scenario: You meet someone else who also feels out of place, you bond over your mutual discomfort and inability to remember how many bises are appropriate, and six months later they’re the person you text when you need someone to sit with you in your uncertainty—the friend who gets it because they were there too, pretending to have their life together while everything felt impossibly hard and terrifyingly uncertain all at once.

It’s not easy to make friends, especially in a country where you may not speak the language, but it is essential. As Helen Keller said, “I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.” Would you like to figure out what type of friend YOU are and maybe adjust your approach to fit your new circumstances? Are you and a new friend really are compatible? To help my clients make friends, have created a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions to help you do just that. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. I’ll also add you to my newsletter list, though you can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time.

Included:

– How well do you know your Friends? Quiz

– What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz

– 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and

– 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend

Last Year’s Christmas Countdown Calendar post

Comment

Just wanted to say how wonderful I think your stories are and today in particular made me think back to when I came to live in France, although my husband was here everything was new including taking on the headship of the International School; And then within a year my husband of 30+ years had suddenly passed away and without the support of my close colleagues I would not have survived and some of those very special people have become my firm friends and still though I dont see them very often are so very special to me. S. B.

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Today’s Story: The Sorano Revival

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Today’s Story: The Plum Pudding Rebellion

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Today’s Story: Chocolate, Sausage, and Salvation

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Today’s Story: Ste Suzanne’s Crèche Vivante

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Today’s Story: The Cardamom Conspiracy

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Today’s Story: Au Café des Platanes

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A Christmas Story: The Spa Day That Went Sideways

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Today’s (Other) Blog Post

4 responses to “Countdown to Christmas Day 6”

Today’s Story: Priya’s Paris Relocation

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