A white Christmas in France

Roy and I have been looking forward to having our first white Christmas since we found out that we were moving to Switzerland. Even though I felt a bit strange being in the snow and away from family over Christmas, I still had a fantastic time with our travel buddies who were our surrogate family for the week of festivities! We all piled into the Chalet, dumped our bags, claimed our beds, stocked the cupboards with our haul of treats and admired the view of the surrounding glaciers and mountains. We knew right there and then that the week was going to be lots of fun. Unfortunately for me.. I had just started to come down the a cold. It was a rather uncomfortable cold but not unbearable. It just forced me to relax on the couch, watch UK tv, cough uncontrollably and constantly look out the window and stare at the marvelous views. My cold stopped me from skiing (or learning to ski) but it definitely didn't stop me from having fun.

The next day the guys went into town to hire some ski gear and us girls - not wanting to waste a perfect opportunity, set about making a stockpile of snowballs to bombard the guys with when they got home from the shops. The snow was just perfect to quickly compact into decent sized balls, so it didn't take us long to have a wall of balls ready for throwing.

We waited patiently behind our wall of snowballs until we heard the car pull up. Unfortunately the three guys are pretty smart and clued on to the fact that they will soon be walking into an ambush and instead they ducked behind the car and began to make their own supply to throw at us. We decided to not wait until they came out from behind their shelter for fear that they would soon have more balls than us to throw and boys being boys, can throw harder and more accurate than us. We started hailing them with snowballs and dodging the ones that were heading our way. It wasn't a very successful mission because no one was significantly covered in snow but it definitely was a fun one!

The guys were keen to head off for a ski, so after some lunch and a discussion about which trails to go on, they were kitted up and ready to head off to the pistes. 

Since Lu and I weren't very fond of skiing, we headed up as passengers in the cable car to check out the top of the mountain to see where all the action was. We trampsed around in the knee-deep snow searching for a place where we could slide down the hill in our sleds. Since we weren't allowed on the ski pistes with our sleds, we headed for the soft, deep, powdery snow and had a bit of a play around. We made snowballs, snow angels, buried each other and watched the skiers whoosh past as they made their way to the lifts for their next ride.

Whilst the skiers weren't skiing, most of the other time was spent either eating, playing boardgames (or computer games), drinking Vin Chaud (which was made by our expert Vin Chaud maker and photographer Mitch), watching reruns of Friends or extreme gingerbread house making shows or playing in the snow just outside of our chalet. Playing in the snow involved many snow angels, sledding down the driveway (even after being told off by the angry French man), burying Aurysia, building snowmen and crafting a magnificent Christmas tree out of snow.

We made up a really fun game where two people sled from the top of the driveway and the rest of us make snowballs to throw at them as they sled past us. It provided hours of fun!

We even had our very own pyrotechnic display on top of our tree (something which definitely rivals the pyrotechnics off the Eiffel Tower at New Years - more on that later).

We decided to modify it the next morning.

Our beautiful tree was quite famous! There were people admiring it and groups posing with it for a holiday photo. I must say, we were all pretty chuffed with ourselves after that effort!

On Christmas morning we had a huge, tasty, fried breakfast after everyone had a skype chat with their families. Skype has made living overseas so much better! I'm not sure how people used to cope living overseas before the internet was invented.. although I'm sure in generations to come people will be saying the same thing about their technology!

mmm... scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes, toast and coffee!

Another play in the snow on Christmas day (it snowed all day), a few episodes of Friends, lots more sweet treats and then it was time for us to cook our grand Christmas feast.

Cous cous stuffed capsicums, roasted vegies, cauliflower au gratin and some more of that tasty, tasty vin chaud.

We were all rather satisfied after that huge meal! All finished off with a relax next to the woodfire. I'd say that it was a pretty fantastic first white Christmas!

No holiday with the six travellers would be complete without some crazy photos after we hijacked the photographers camera (I'm pretty sure he was busy making us some vin chaud). 

Sleeping bag monsters!!

Thanks to Mitch and Lu for the use to their great photos!