Santa’s Magic Sack
A Christmas Story from Our Life in France series
If you should drive past our home in France (photo above) on a winter’s night and see a sack hanging off the roof near the chimney, get excited, take photos and post on social media that you’ve seen Santa’s real life sack appearing to burst with presents, let me fill you in on a little secret first.
It is not Santa’s sack. With only a modest sized fridge and numerous bottles of Taittinger Champagne to keep chilled during our winter visits and Christmas festivities, we’ve come up with an ingenious way to enlarge our fridge’s capacity.
We hang a sturdy sack out the window and fill it with the overflow of our favourite bubbly. With usual winter evening temps hovering between 3⁰ and 7⁰ the roof makes an excellent second fridge. When the gentle winter sun eventually comes up, and threatens to raise the temp on our champagne, we move the bottles to just outside the back of the house in the shade of the nearby tree.
A Word of Caution
Now, should you also wish to use this ingenious method of keeping extra drinks chilled during winter, I offer a word of caution.
Do make sure that heavy snow is not predicted overnight or you will find, as we have, that either you’ll be digging your sack out of the snow or that a cork may pop or bottle break. This will result in showering your roof with glass fragments and the sweet fragrance of champagne. Which, while a lovely fragrance to inhale if you open your attic window … is a tad over the top and expensive! An ingenious idea we think, but just watch the weather forecast.
I’ll let you decide whether a sack full of Taittinger Champagne is as good as Santa’s magic sack.
