Winter Chic

with lapis skies and sticky buns

I bought a new jacket at the airport last month. I was traveling home into the cold and wasn’t properly dressed. I know better, I’m Canadian, but my desire for minimal packing overrode the need for coziness upon re-entry. So, with bare arms covered in goosebumps, I rocked up to a sports store next to the coffee shop and the insta-spa just before my departure gate, and bought a not particularly affordable puffy jacket hanging closest to the cash. The colour was lapis named after the stone lapis lazuli, prized for its bright blue lustre. Vitreous is one of its descriptors. I’d say the jacket is more blueberries whizzed with icing sugar then wrapped in wrinkled plastic wrap. It was impulsive, it was ridiculous, but there’s a part of me that wants to be Montreal chic and that jacket took me there, all these years later. 

I worked as a nanny in Montreal in the late 1990’s. Every morning I’d take the bus from my apartment down Ave du Parc, then hop on another bus heading west along Sherbrooke, my body thick in the layers required for winter mornings in Montreal. I wore long johns under Levis, wool socks in Timberland boots, turtlenecks under turtlenecks, wool mittens, a hat, and a series of ski jackets that together formed a barrier against a minus 15 celsius winter. 

My job, more or less, was to drive the kids to and from school. This meant leaving Westmount with Peter Gzowski on the radio, driving over snowy Mount Royal to their French school in Outremont, dropping off, then picking up at noon, then again at three with Richardson’s Roundup. For the noon pick-up I’d park the family’s Volkswagen next to a snowbank, slip my way in those salt-stained Timberland boots over a snowbank and down the frozen, rutted sidewalk to the side door of the school. Inside I’d wait in the tall, hot hallway outside the classroom with a glass transom above the door. 

As I stood, defrosting, I’d watch the parents file in. It was a study in style. These Montrealers always maintained a certain suaveness despite the weather. A French je ne sais quoi was woven into this place several centuries ago and has simmered away like a rich coq au vin, condensing, deepening and taking on its own flavours as the years passed. I tried to camouflage my bulky, layered, overheated, Nova Scotian self into the beige walls; it’s easier to properly examine the ways of others when you’re invisible.  

One mother always swooped in at the last minute, cheeks kissed with cold. “I’ve been cross-country skiing on the mountain,” she’d say en français. “How could I not? It’s gorgeous outside.” It was true. Montreal was cold, bitingly so, but most days the sun shone in a cloudless, lapis sky. She wore a soft white toque perched on her head and a bright, puffy down jacket that hit at her hips. Sometimes she’d still have slim ski tights on and sunglasses perched on her head. Her face was tanned from the winter sun, and her lipstick was always fresh. But if you looked down at her feet (at everyone’s feet) there were always big, rubber-soled Sorels. Practical glam, I’d call it. Snowsquall chic. She could handle snowbanks and roads rutted with ice. They wouldn’t hold her back.

The air in that hallway was thick, but these suave people carried a winter freshness about them, like linen on the line flapping and snapping in the cold air. When the classroom door opened the skier would embrace her daughter and together they’d swoop away before the freshness could dissipate. I would come too early, linger too long and leave late. There’s a malaise that comes with bulky sweatiness; I’d have to pull myself together before an afternoon of tobogganing. 

This is the malaise that strikes on Christmas day. It happens when you’re sad, tired, overwhelmed, overstuffed, and too warm in your new socks and flannel pyjamas. The cinnamon rolls tasted good while opening stockings, of course they did, but they’re better when balanced with a blast of fresh air. So this year, as instructed on the latest episode of The Food Podcast, I’ll eventually gather my family, don my lapis coat, and head outside. There might even be a swipe of lipstick too. If you see me, be kind. I may look like sweetened blueberry sauce wrapped in plastic, but inside I am a chic Montrealer, striding out for a ski.

PS - speaking of Montreal, Louise Penny’s Gamache series, set in an around Montreal, has come to television. It’s called Three Pines - I’m two episodes in and loving it.

And as mentioned in The Food Podcast’s Field Guide to Christmas, I give you James and sons’ sticky buns. They are devotees of America’s Test Kitchen for its scientific approach to cooking yet clear and kind recipe writing style. I’ve found the recipe they like best perfectly transcribed here, thank heavens. I am also a fan of Violet Bakery’s tea biscuit cinnamon buns, baked in muffin cups. One year I made a batch a week before Christmas and froze them, muffin tin and all, set them out before bed on Christmas eve then popped them in the warming oven as we opened our stockings. It was one of my more smug moments. One day I’ll try Joy the Baker’s version, made from a can of pre-made biscuit dough. Brilliant.