By Greg Nikkel
The bright lights, the music and the traditions of Christmas in Canada are different but wonderful for Rotary exchange student Liza Biard, a 17-year-old who is living in Weyburn for this school year, attending the Weyburn Comprehensive School.
Liza is from the small port city of Lorient, located in Brittany, France, and is currently staying with the Bitz family, as their oldest daughter Hannah is currently an exchange student in Belgium.
“Christmas is way different in Europe. The Christmas spirit is not that strong, as people don’t have lights on their house, and we don’t have snow and cold,” she said, adding that for her, having the snow is a nice part of Christmas in Canada.
Asked what her family enjoys as Christmas traditions, Liza noted one is to watch Christmas movies with her mom, particularly American ones, citing the Jim Carrey version of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” as one of her personal favourites.
Liza has an older sister, Ilona, who is in her second year of university taking commerce, and her parents are Helene and Thierry. Her mom is a social worker, and her dad is a border supervisor at a different high school in Lorient.
With a smile, Liza recounted how she and her sister love playing Christmas music around the house and teasing her dad, mostly because he doesn’t like it.
From experiencing get-togethers with her host family or with members of the Rotary Club here in Weyburn, Liza said all the Christmas lights and gatherings are like in the movies.
At home, her family will usually go to her grandparents place in another city about an hour’s drive away from Lorient (which is the same city where Ilona attends university), and a Christmas dish might be comprised of scallops and mussels, or a pork dish, and for dessert they have tiramisu cake.
Her grandmother had four children and 10 grandchildren, and each grandchild has a favourite dish they want their grandmother to make for them, Liza explained. Tiramisu is the favourite of the eldest boy, and another favourite request is for lemon meringue pie.
“My sister and I love soup, and we don’t usually have that at Christmas,” she added.
On Christmas day, she and her family wear Christmas pajamas, and have a specially-made bread, and among the spreads is Nutella. Her grandmother also makes her own cocoa, using a square of chocolate and milk.
When Liza and her sister were younger, their parents would have an Advent calendar, opening a new window each day as the calendar counted down to Christmas Day.
As she grew older, Liza began to realize a number of her friends didn’t celebrate Christmas.
Her family puts a Christmas tree up, noted Liza, but usually it’s a fake tree, “because we have a dog who is really not very respectful of it.” During the interview, she noted that she loves the real tree the Bitz family put up, bought from the Young Fellows tree lot.
Liza has a special connection with each parent that is a part of her experience here in Canada. She noted that her mom travelled a lot, to such destinations as Egypt, Corfu, London and Spain, and said, “That’s a part of what I love to do. I want to travel just like she did.”
Since coming to Weyburn, she has traveled to various points around Western Canada, including a long road trip to Golden, B.C., as soon as she arrived in Canada, and more recently, flying up to Churchill, Man., where she saw polar bears and the Northern Lights.
She has also taken the sewing class at the Comp as her mom is into sewing, and her mom has been impressed with some of the projects she’s done so far here.
Her dad loves history and geography, and she’s taken this to heart for herself which has helped make her time in Canada special to her. Also, of her family, only her father can speak English, while her sister and mother cannot. Liza is very fluent in English, as she started to learn the language in Grade 4, and her high school subjects included English literature.
Liza admits that the English she learned at school is “very academic”, and she learned more of the language by watching American shows and movies, and through YouTube, as well as from her fellow students since coming to Weyburn.
Asked if there are any foods that she misses, Liza said she loves her baguettes, and hasn’t yet been able to find a version of it here that she likes. There is a French restaurant in Regina that she enjoys going to.
“A lot of baking here is too sweet for me, too much sugar,” she added.
For Christmas, the Bitz family will be giving her a true Canadian experience, as they will take her with them to visit family in Valleyview, Alta., about four hours drive north of Edmonton. Kim Bitz said this will be a very traditional French-Canadian Christmas, and a part of it will be filling a stocking for Liza, which she has never experienced before.
