Les Oies et les Canards

We were lucky to have the help of a dear friend Charlette, who with her husband Marcel had lived many years in French Equatorial Africa. Charlette said that out there if you weren’t prepared to kill and pluck your own chicken you never got any meat to eat. So that solved the problem of our roast goose on Christmas Day. Incidentally, for many French people all the excitement happens on Christmas Eve when the great feast is held on the family’s return from Mass. Christmas Day is very quiet, so quiet that one year the local electricity board took advantage of the fact that no one gets up till lunchtime to cut off the supply while they carried out repairs. This hardly helps when you are trying to prepare a formal Christmas lunch.