In which we celebrate Christmas Eve

In France, the traditional Christmas meal is eaten on Christmas Eve night, after midnight mass, and is quite elaborate, with many courses, and, of course, a bûche de Noël to finish the meal. We began the process of preparation on Wednesday. There were a couple of complications.
1) We weren't going to drag our kids to midnight mass. Perhaps more relevantly, we weren't going to force all the other people at midnight mass to listen to our exhausted 3 year old scream through the entire service, so we would be eating earlier than midnight.
2) We had some unexpected expenses early in the month, and payday was Christmas Day, so we had 60€ remaining with which to buy food for our feast. (Not to mention Christmas Day itself, and the day before Christmas.) That meant we wouldn't be having the traditional foie gras, oysters, three kinds of roast game, cheese plate, etc. The bûche was nonnegotiable.

We ultimately decided on Boeuf Bourguignon for dinner, along with mashed potatoes, salad, and brussels sprouts. We bought a bûche at the local bakery. (Next year, I'm going to make one for Christmas dinner. Consider this as laying claim to planning the dessert!)

Christmas Eve morning we went to the library to pick out some new books. Sapphire discovered that they have tons of Babysitter's Club books. I discovered that it isn't easy to find books that are difficult enough to challenge Ezio, but not too intense for a not quite 7 year old. Unfortunately, he's pretty much exhausted the Asterix comics at this point.

After lunch, I started cooking. Blaise stopped at the ATM and discovered that we'd been paid a few days early, so we took out some cash for our Christmas Day plans.

Dinner was very good, as was the cake. I'm happy to report that my children like brussels sprouts. Afterwards, Cherry went to bed, and Ezio and Sapphire and I played some cards.