French Nudist Christmas Celebration Review

The mistral wind had finally died, leaving the Provence sky a crisp, deep sapphire. On a hillside overlooking the Luberon valley, the village of Saint-Pierre-des-Corps lay quiet. But it was not asleep. In the largest of the converted stone farmhouses, a warm, golden light spilled from every window, carrying with it the scent of roasting chestnuts, pine resin, and mulled wine spiced with star anise and orange.

To an outsider, the scene might have been a surrealist painting. A hundred and thirty people of all ages, shapes, and sizes, utterly without clothing, moved through the festooned rooms. There was no awkwardness, no hidden leer. There was only the deep, unselfconscious comfort of people who had long ago separated nudity from sexuality, and reattached it to honesty, vulnerability, and joy. french nudist christmas celebration

The children were the most natural of all. A pack of little ones, painted head-to-toe with washable green and red finger paint, had declared themselves to be lutins de Noël —Christmas elves. They zipped between adult legs, shrieking with laughter, their painted stripes shimmering in the firelight. The youngest, three-year-old Léo, had decided that the ideal place for a paintbrush was his own navel, which he’d turned into a tiny red target. The mistral wind had finally died, leaving the

Tonight, that philosophy was on full display. At a card table in the corner, a group of teenagers—usually the most self-conscious age—were playing a fierce game of belote . They were naked too, and while the boys had initially tried to sit with hands perpetually in their laps, by the second game they had forgotten. Luc, seventeen, with a constellation of acne on his shoulders, had just won a trick and slapped his bare thigh in triumph. His opponent, fifteen-year-old Manon, laughed and called him a crétin , utterly unbothered by the fact that her own body was in the middle of its own awkward, beautiful transformation. In the largest of the converted stone farmhouses,

Gérard shuffled to the massive stone fireplace, where a log the size of a small car was spitting embers. He didn’t bother dressing to poke the fire. Why would he? The heat on his skin was the first gift of the evening.

There were tears. There was applause. And then, because this was France, there was cheese.

At midnight, the tradition took its most surprising turn. The Le Père Noël Nu —The Naked Santa—arrived. It was Thierry, the village baker, who had padded his belly with a pillow and wore only a red felt hat, a curly white beard, and a pair of black lace-up boots. He carried a burlap sack not of plastic toys, but of clementines, walnuts, and small, smooth stones from the river Durance, each painted with a single word: Paix. Joie. Santé. Amour.