Fun day today. Maj, Amita and I went up to the Christmas tree lot at Parc Lahaie on St. Joseph and St. Laurent. It was packed with people there for Noël dans le Parc, a month-long Christmas festival held in two parks in Montreal. Of course, we had no idea it was going on before we got there.
Christmas tree lots in Quebec are a lot more festive than the businesslike lots in, say, California. There is often a pen full of farm animals -- like the Christmas manger, eh? -- that kids can look at and pet. Since it's often ass-cold, there's also usually a fireplace or a barrel fire. For some weird reason, all the lots in our neighborhood are in public parks, but that might have to do with a dearth of big parking lots in the Plateau.
But Noël dans le Parc was even bigger than all that. When we arrived, there were two blues players in separate giant plastic globes hovering in the trees above the campfire. In two other (terrestrial) booths, a Quebec traditional music band was playing silently behind a glass window while a radio crew in the other booth broadcast them live. There was a concession stand serving bière and vin chaud (of which we ordered two), and an open-air museum with fun stuff for kids.
We ended up hanging out for more than an hour. Amita June developed an intense fascination with the sheep in the petting zoo, and even after Papa had bought an 8' tree and tied it to the roof, she insisted on going back to the pen and saying goodbye one more time. The tree looks great in our living room -- it's almost scraping the ceiling, but it fills up its corner nicely.
tags: christmas tree montreal noel dans le parc quebec christmas amitajune
Lina and Jeremy's Xmas party
Even better tonight was our friends Lina and Jeremy's Christmas Party, at their house. Maj whipped up some steamed artichokes to take over, and I put together mixins for hot buttered rums, and we headed over to their great place in Little Italy.
We got there early and Lina had made mulled wine -- a big pot of it, based on the recipe from Clarence the Angel. Amita June headed off with Clea and Sylvie, two girls much older than her, and although she couldn't really communicate with them she followed along with what they were doing just fine. The under-10 crowd eventually settled around the TV, which was originally on Hockey Night in Canada but eventually switched over to a tape of Zoboomafoo.
So her Mama and I got to hang out with grownups for a change, which I at least was ill-equipped to do, but made a game attempt. Lots of nice people, including L and J's upstairs neighbor Annabelle, whose band The Wailin Jennys is doing pretty darn good lately. They're up for a couple slots in the Canadian Folk Music Awards tomorrow. Good for them.
I made a big batch of HBRs and they were quite a hit. It's such an easy recipe, I'll share it right here:
- 1 oz dark rum
- 1 tsp brown sugar
- 1 tsp butter
- 8 oz boiling water
Mix it all together in a coffee mug and serve when the butter's melted. Keeps you warm when you need it. We came home early, of course -- the baby's getting independent, but not that independent -- and now we're rresting from a long day.
tags: lina jeremy xmas party annabelle the wailin jennys
Wikitravel RSS
So, I know this sounds crazy, but we've never really had much of an RSS presence for Wikitravel. We've got an RSS feed for Recent Changes, of course, as does every MediaWiki site, but never anything else.
But I was talking to Jack Herrick of wikiHow recently, and he was telling me that their Daily Howto RSS feed is one of their biggest vectors of people coming into the site. Wikitravellers make updated news and information on our Main Page all the time, so I figure it'd be useful to make an RSS feed of new stuff from Wikitravel, too.
So I've started scraping the frequently-updated parts of the site to make them available through a Wikitravel News feed. It includes the strange-travel trivia from Wikitravel:Discover and the Travel news info, too.
There's been a lot of work in it -- making feeds out of wiki pages requires some assumptions and creative markup. But I'm getting closer, and I think the lessons I'm learning with our English version will help making RSS feeds for the other language versions easier. I'll be adding in more features for English, too, as I learn how to scrape them better.