Jeanne was in charge of the kitchen and directed her crew quite masterfully. Each of us was assigned a role and a recipe: it might succeed or it might fail, but it had to be ­followed to the letter, regardless of the results. The kitchen and dining room had been subdivided into three command centres: for pastry, meat dishes and vegetables. (Michèle, as lazy as always, insisted on being responsible for the peas and potatoes, and at the last minute she forgot to open the can of cranberries) All day, the house was a hive of activity, of songs from Abbé Gadbois’ songbooks, of silly jokes and laughter and exclamations of disgust when a recipe didn’t work out or of rapture when something exquisite emerged from the oven—the tourtières were a triumph: golden, ­aromatic, glistening with fat, everyone agreed they could make the cover of Madame Benoit’s Encyclopedia. They were the work of Arielle, who was stunned at her accomplishment: she’d never made a tourtière in her life and was expecting to take from the oven some doughy, shapeless, probably foul-smelling lumps, and here she’d produced a culinary ­triumph that brought her unanimous congratulations.

Mathieu amazed us all by producing, in our oven because Jeanne’s was already over-burdened, the most gorgeous lemon pie we’d ever seen, even more spectacular than my mother’s, which had always been my criterion. (I even caught myself thinking, to my great shame yet laughing up my sleeve, that Mathieu’s pie would have seduced my ­mother . . . ) Sébastien was terribly proud of his father and went around repeating: “My daddy makes the goodest pies!”

All this fuss was, in fact, because of Sébastien, on whose account we’d decided to celebrate Christmas five days early. We’d explained that he’d have two Christmases this year, one at home and one with us, two Christmas trees as well, two turkeys and, most of all, two sets of presents, and that put him in a trance. At this moment his presents were piled under the magnificent tree that Jeanne and Mélène had put up the night before, and Sébastien kept shaking them as he tried to guess their contents. His excitement mounted as the day progressed, his behaviour was very close to unbearable, but everyone still thought he was adorable, intelligent, cute and bright—and he was taking full advantage of it.