Sunday 27 November

Palo Alto. Home by dark, barely, from a bike ride up Alpine Road to the top, though not all the way to Skyline, the road along the ridge that overlooks the Pacific. Alpine Road used to go to the top, I believe, but a landslide cut the paved road some time in the past. There is still a mountain-bike trail.

I saw my first Christmas tree of the season yesterday. My granddaughter was excited by the remote control that allowed her to change the lights from all-white to redyellowgreenblue at the touch of a button. She may need new batteries before the 25th. In my childhood the lights were red and green and firemen came round to school to make sure we told our parents not to run cords under rugs. My mother was in charge of decorations and she made sure that on New Year’s Day we carefully removed each piece of tinsel from the branches (real pine—the smell!) and put it back in the little flat packages for next year’s tree. My grandaughters’ tree does look pretty with all-white and coloured lights, and brings back most of the magic I must have felt at her age.

We’ll be celebrating this year in a village in the Vaucluse in the south of France with my husband’s family. In France Christmas is all about food (not everyone will agree). A nativity scene of little clay manger figures is traditional, a tree isn’t, at least not in Provence and northerners would scorn the scrawny conifers that pass for Christmas trees in the local supermarkets and garden centres. My husband’s grandfather was a potter, and his mother had at least two sets of Crèche figures he’d made. I remember seeing a crèche she had assembled in an abalone shell we brought from California with about the size of a fingernail. Place St Sulpice in Paris has a shop that sells santons from various potters but the traditional place to shop for them is the Foire aux Santons on the Vieux Port in Marseille.