Throughout December of seventh grade, my French teacher swigged from a flask filled with a holiday concoction that she alluded to only in the vaguest terms of her native tongue, introducing it as her "happy beverage." It was this terrifying Parisian — known for throwing staplers at students who mispronounced her favorite vocabulary words — who, while lecturing on French Christmas customs, made me realize how the eccentric charm of all family holiday traditions gets lost in translation.
She addressed the class in French: "We place the shoes of the children in front of the family hearth for the father of Christmas to find and replenish with goodies," she said. Then, calmly pelting the boy next to me with a paperclip, she added, "The bad children, they get nothing but a whip for their fathers to beat them with." We shifted in our seats. "My father would put the laces of his army boots for me to find," she continued, rooting around for her flask, "and slap my bottom with them, because I was une rebelle."
This couldn't be demonstrative of the wider French Christmas culture, I thought. This whipping business? It must be a tradition unique to her clan of Parisian masochists.
I looked up. Madame was brandishing her eraser, yelling at the boy next to me to describe, in French, a family Christmas tradition to the class. He took a breath. "My family does each year what the Germans peoples before us did. We hide a ..." A pained look of concentration darkened his face. "A...an old cucumber. And the children of the family have to find it." Madame looked incredulous. "An old cucumber?" "Oui," the boy nodded vehemently. His scant French vocabulary precluded any elaboration.
I considered the German-bred boy next to me. I mean, at least French holiday traditions were constructive. Whipping people might be violent, but it accomplished something, and you could even put a little festive spin on it if pressed to, slap on some peppermint oil and tip the whip with holly berries. But stashing old vegetables around the house and making people look for them? Not only did that lack spark, it struck me as sadly pointless. What does one do with the old cucumber once it is recovered? Not eat it, surely. That would be punishment in itself.
As I debated this, German Boy was rifling through the vocabulary index of his book. "Pickle!" he cried, triumphant. "We look for pickles!" Oh. A pickle. Mmmm ... nope, still weird.
Suddenly, Madame looked at me. My turn to share in French. "When we buy a tree for the Christmas times, we buy the tree only that has the ... the favorite creature inside." This was my closest approximation of a tradition that had started with my father's family: The Foresman children look for the Jellypopper, a tiny, imaginary being (rotund and jolly, but otherwise open to interpretation) that lives inside the perfect Christmas tree; once the Jellypopper is found, the search is over and the purchase is made. A brilliant system, but Madame wasn't buying it: "What, in the tree? You put a real animal in there?"
I began to think of a way to rephrase, but found that I couldn't. Madame shook her head and jabbed her eraser at the next student in line. Glancing over at Pickle Boy, I realized that only second-generation Germans really understand what a triumph it is to beat all their siblings to the old cucumber. Whip-stuffed shoes by the fireside could warm the cockles of only Madame's heart, granted that her cockles were warm-able. If, somehow, I acquired the linguistic means to explain the Jellypopper in French, it would continue to defy translation on a subtler level. Describing it to a friend in English after class wouldn't be any more effective; it would garner a vague "Oh, that's neat" at best. There's something in these family traditions that works on a nonverbal level, resisting explanation. They stay loyal to the family. I watched Madame move down the line. Observing the girl next to me take a paperclip to the forehead, I felt filled with quiet holiday pride. Another family secret kept safe and sound. Becca Foresman is a sophomore from Del Mar, Calif. She can be reached at foresman@princeton.edu.
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