How to Make Your Own French Gift Basket
Monday December 1, 2008
If you know a francophile, delight him or her with a great France-themed gift basket. Here are step-by-step instructions, including links to compare prices on suggested items to use. You can find some unique containers to serve as baskets, and stuff them full of items customized for your francophile. Maybe you put books set in France for the literary francophile, paired with a booklight. For the foodie francophile, use Le Creuset cookware as the container and fill with gourmet goodies. Create a cheese-lover, wine-lover or travel-junkie themed gift backet.
Find out how: How to Make Your Own French Gift Basket. Also see my Gift Guide for Francophiles.
Comments
Guidebooks: Use a combination of Rick Steves and Cadogan. Eyewitness is too heavy to travel with. Michelin Green Guides are good but is inefficiently organized. Even new Lonely Planets have out of date information.
Maps: No mention of the best source of maps for France, IGN. IGN maps are available in the U.S. or can be ordered directly from France and arrive in the U.S. in as little as one week.
Movies: there are too many better movies set in France to list them all but here’s a sample, in no particular order:
The Diving Bell And The Butterfly
Amélie
400 Blows
Au Revoir Les Enfants
My Mother’s Castle
My Father’s Glory
Days of Glory
The Valet
Blame It on Fidel!
Jean de Florette and the sequel,
Manon des Sources
My Best Friend
The Sorrow And The Pity
Small Change
A Good Year
Avenue Montaigne
Books:
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France (Vintage)
by Carmen Callil
Coming Down The Seine
by Robert Gibbings
The author travels by boat from the source of the Seine. Book includes beautiful woodcuts of his journey.
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, from the Revolution to the First World War
by Graham Robb
A Distant Mirror
by Barbara Tuchman
The 14th century. Most of the book takes place in France or involves the French.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon)
by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Story of the first months of World War I
Narrow Dog to Carcassonne
by Terry Darlington
Author’s trip on a 60-foot long narrow boat from England to Carcassonne
A Movable Feast
by Ernest Hemmingway
Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949
by Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper
Paris: The Secret History
by Andrew Hussey
Outwitting the Gestapo
by Lucie Aubrac, 1912-2007
The authors telling of her time in the French resistance near Lyon.
The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France
by Ina Caro
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French
by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow
The Story of French
by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow (same authors as 60,000,000 Frenchmen)
Two Towns in Provence
by M.F.K. Fisher
Village in he Vaucluse
by Laurence Wylie
The author lived in Peyrane (really Roussillon) for about one year in 1950-1951 and writes about the way that people lived. A fascinating look at a way of life that disappeared by the time he returned 10 years later.