At Christmas, it was a Franco custom to have an all-night party—a réveillon—after the midnight mass. The following excerpt is from my French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood.

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For our first Christmas in our new home, my parents hosted a Christmas réveillon for both sides of the family. We children grew excited witnessing the preparations in the days prior to the réveillon when the tourtières, cookies, pies, and cakes were being baked. (“Just one cookie, but no more,” my mother must have repeated many times. “We have to save these for the réveillon.”)

Because my grandparents were still living downstairs with us, my grandmother Ledoux did not have her own kitchen and she and my mother must have worked together. Back on Farwell Street, my grandmother Verreault would also have been cooking and baking in her little kitchen. The oilcloth on the oval family dinner table would have been covered with flour and pie dishes as well as a rolling pin, knives, many spoons, and kneading boards to work her dough. She had little time between preparing regular meals for her still large family and so she needed to use her moments carefully to show up at the réveillon with something to contribute. It would not have been like her to come empty-handed.

The night of the 24th, children were consigned to bed early, but since we were so young—I was turning five the next month in January—“early” was perhaps not so different from our regular bedtime. (In later years, however, oh!, the torture of going to bed at seven!) My parents, too, would sometimes lie down before the réveillon.

That first Christmas on the farm, since we children were young, it is reasonable to surmise that we did not go to midnight mass. It is likely one of the adults stayed home with us while the others went to Saint Anne’s. It was probably my mother who stayed as she could then manage last-minute preparations: setting the table, putting condiments out, finishing cooking a turkey (or, in later years, it would be a chicken as my parents would have been established in the poultry business), washing preparation dishes.

While she was up and about, we children slept snugly blanketed in our cold bedrooms, but then, around one, the many voices filling the living room and kitchen aroused us. The bed, which I shared with my brother Billy, was cozy warm, but when one of our parents awoke us and reminded us of the réveillon, we did not tarry. Stumbling sleepily into the living room, we came upon our grandparents, uncles and aunts, and cousins who were gathered around the Christmas tree.

These all-night parties were a child’s fantasy, a time when rules did not apply, when children got up in the middle of the night and no one told them to go back to bed. Sometimes during the réveillon, Santa came in from the shed, or in later years, from upstairs. When, one year, Billy said that Santa was Uncle Gene because he recognized the shoes, I felt it showed how wrong even my big brother could be—Santa Claus was full of magic and could make his shoes look like Uncle Gene’s if he wanted!

The night of the Christmas réveillon, Santa Claus brought a play dishware set to my sister Claire. Later when the gift giving was over, wanting to play together, we asked my mother for some milk and cookies. The milk was our coffee, and the cookies—well, the cookies were perhaps too good to be anything but cookies. Outside, it was dark and cold—perhaps even blistery—but inside we were having a cozy dinner party. Claire, also in pajamas in front of a darkened window, sat with me at a little table that was set with the new play dishes. The window was dressed with plastic curtains. In back of me was a built-in cabinet, filled with dishes and tableware. The wallpaper was old—it must have dated from when the Smalls owned the house. I am certain the wallpaper was the source of some dissatisfaction for my mother who liked things to be comme il faut.

Then, around 4:30 or 5, the grown-ups began to leave. We children had drifted to bed where we sometimes found a cousin or two or three lying asleep on top of the covers. We would often just lie down next to them on the bedspread. In the morning, the cousins would be gone, and we ourselves were cozy beneath the blankets. By the time we wandered into the kitchen, our parents and grandparents who were still using the bedroom at the southwest corner of the house were sitting together, their Christmas breakfast long since enjoyed. Our own breakfast, if you’d have asked us which no one did, was merely a bother as we were eager to return to the new toys we had received at the Christmas réveillon.

“They’ll still be there after you eat,” one of the adults was sure to say.

We no longer have a Christmas réveillon, but I still remember them so fondly.

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For more stories, go to French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood.