Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn't come from a store. - Dr. Seuss The weather is mild, much milder than anyone of us would have expected. Or desired. Breakfast is served in a dim dining room early morning, warmth and light blazing from the fireplace, the old fourteenth century fireplace of limestone and wood, while outside ...
Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent. - William Shakespeare I love the holidays. Halloween comes and goes swathed in orange and black, tiny marzipan jack-o’-lanterns and chocolate skeletons dancing across supermarket shelves and shop windows. Thanksgiving arrives sharp on its heels in a burst ...
The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights. - Giotto di Bondone Forty-two years ago, a young man on the brink of adulthood, a young man just seventeen years old and soon having the heavy responsibility of choosing his future career, of selecting his university, stood in the ...
Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits. - Baron Justus von Liebig, 1893 National Chocolate Day. I have never quite understood these national and international food days, the celebration of this foodstuff or that, and the ...
It’s all a balancing act, isn’t it? Whatever we do, work, parenting, marriage, home, we spend all of our days juggling. Add to that the little luxuries of life, cooking, shopping, visiting friends, visiting interesting places. Reading and writing. And it’s a veritable circus: juggling, balancing, tightrope walking, taming wild animals…. A friend, spending two ...
Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, 'It will be happier.' - Alfred Lord Tennyson The Jewish New Year edges its way through the tail end of summer, pushes through the last warm days and the start of the rain, bringing with it something melancholy. Maybe it is the sudden oncoming of ...
Summertime. It’s the little bundle of memories we carry with us from our childhood, year after year that makes summertime what it is. Whether stifling hot days and balmy evenings or chilly, gray dampness seeping through the cracks of tightly closed windowpanes and drawn curtains, June, July and August are infused with something intangible, special that ...
Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them. – Nancy Mitford I sit next to Jane comfortably and convivially at the white plastic picnic table in the shade of the overhang, a tangle of branches heaped upon the table. We each have a plastic ...
Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came; and if the village had been beautiful at first, it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its richness. – Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist I really did not think that I would be making strawberry jam this early in the season. Strawberries had just begun making their ...
Wild Goose Chase Moricette. I don’t call her Moricette, I call her Mme. Lainel, but my husband refers to her as Moricette, her first name, when he speaks of her, fondly. Because it is such an old-fashioned, musical name. And she is such an old-fashioned, delightful woman. Mme. and M. Lainel were the first owners of ...
I'm Jamie; welcome to the new Life's a Feast!
I run a hotel in Chinon, France, and write about life, culture, modern day living and food.
My passion is to create vibrant and unique experiences.
