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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