Belgian Advent Calendar – Day 14
A short note on how and why I share book links
I’m starting today with a cup of coffee—a scented Irish Coffee blend I picked up just yesterday from Maison Bergamote, a beautiful little shop in Liège, which is coincidentally the birthplace of the author we’re speaking of today. And it’s only appropriate we begin this story with coffee at hand, since we’re talking detectives.
There’s something about reading detective fiction in winter that feels exactly right. Maybe it’s the way mysteries mirror the season—both ask us to look closer, to notice what’s hidden beneath the surface, to find meaning in small details easily overlooked. Or maybe it’s simply that a good mystery, like a good fire, gives you a reason to stay inside while the world goes cold and dark outside.
Georges Simenon understood this instinctively. Born in Liège in 1903—you can find his statue there now, sitting on a bench right next to City Hall—Simenon became Belgium’s most famous writer, a title earned largely through his prolific detective fiction. He’s the third most translated author who wrote in French, after Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. That’s the kind of success that speaks to something universal in his work, something that crosses borders and languages with ease.
His greatest creation was Inspector Maigret, a character who has become as much a part of European literary culture as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. The iconic French actor Jean Gabin brought Maigret to life in several film adaptations, cementing the detective’s image in the popular imagination—pipe, overcoat, patient gaze. But where other famous detectives dazzle with deduction, Maigret does something quieter: he observes, he absorbs, he feels his way toward truth.
Un Noël de Maigret (translated as A Maigret Christmas) is seasonally perfect, a novella that wraps mystery around the particulars of Christmas Day in Paris. It’s 1950-something, and Maigret finds himself reluctantly drawn into a case when two neighbours from across the street appear at his apartment with a strange story : Santa turned up in the bedroom of a little girl on Christmas Eve. What unfolds isn’t so much a puzzle to be solved as an atmosphere to be inhabited—Simenon’s particular genius was never plot mechanics, but rather the accumulation of mood, the weight of weather and light and human behavior observed with an almost novelistic patience.
The story moves from one apartment to the other, from clue to deduction to clever inspiration, on a background of Christmas day lunch and plum liqueur, under the discreet, domestic surveillance of Madame Maigret.
What makes this slim volume—it can be read in an evening, which is exactly when it should be read—so satisfying is how Simenon uses the Christmas setting not as decoration but as essential texture. The holiday amplifies the story’s central concerns: family secrets, the masks we wear for each other, the gap between the life we show to the world and the one we actually live. Christmas is supposed to be about togetherness, but Simenon knows it’s often when loneliness and dysfunction become most visible, when the pressure to perform happiness makes whatever’s wrong more acute.
Maigret himself is the perfect detective for this kind of story. He’s middle-aged, solid, deeply married to the patient and understanding Madame Maigret. He drinks calvados and smokes his pipe and thinks slowly, carefully. He doesn’t leap to conclusions. He sits in rooms and watches people and lets understanding come to him gradually, the way snow accumulates—flake by flake until suddenly there’s enough to see clearly.
Simenon wrote seventy-five Maigret novels and twenty-eight Maigret short stories over the course of his career, an output that seems almost impossible. He was famously fast, sometimes writing a novel in as little as eleven days, typing in marathon sessions fueled by coffee and nerves. This productivity has sometimes worked against his critical reputation—there’s a lingering sense that anything written that quickly can’t be truly serious. But speed and seriousness aren’t opposites. A Maigret Christmas demonstrates this economy beautifully. There’s no wasted motion, no excess description, you’re going through the pages desperately wanting to know who’s guilty, but somehow the world feels completely present.
For those new to Maigret, this is an ideal entry point. It’s self-contained, atmospheric, and carries that particular pleasure of a mystery that feels solvable but stays just out of reach until Simenon is ready to reveal it. For those already familiar with the inspector, it’s a chance to spend Christmas Eve with an old friend, watching him do what he does best: pay attention, stay patient, and trust that understanding will come if you’re willing to wait for it.
I find myself thinking back to Maison Bergamote, where I bought this coffee. The warm lighting, the carefully curated selection of teas and blends, the cozy atmosphere of a shop that understands how small pleasures create comfort during the coldest months. This would be exactly what Madame Maigret would have loved—a cozy Christmas where beautiful things create the family ambiance. Too bad her husband has murders to solve!
Pour something warm, find a comfortable chair, and let Simenon transport you to a Paris Christmas decades past. The snow is falling, the city is quiet, and Maigret is on the case. What more could December ask for?
See you tomorrow for another Belgian treasure!
Until then, Merry Advent!
During the 2025 Advent season, each post on The Ritual of Reading was accompanied by a Daily Advent Letter, sent privately to subscribers. These letters echo the theme of the article, but take a more personal and reflective path — closer to the hesitations, intuitions, and emotions that accompanied the writing.
What follows is the Daily Advent Letter that was written alongside this post.
| December 14th |
| Dear Friend, Do you ever follow strangers? I don’t mean in any sinister way—I mean that particular pull you feel when someone catches your eye on the street, when something about their bearing or their silhouette seems to carry a story you need to understand. When they seem, somehow, familiar in a way that has nothing to do with actually knowing them. This happened to me recently in Ghent. I was walking through the city center when an older gentleman passed me going in the opposite direction. I only saw him from behind—the set of his shoulders, his gait, the particular way he held himself in his overcoat. And something in me sparked with recognition. He looked exactly like how I’d always imagined Georges Simenon. Now, I’m not delusional. Simenon died in 1989. I know this. And Ghent wasn’t even particularly connected to him—he was born in Liège, lived in Paris, spent years in Switzerland and America. There was no logical reason for this stranger to have anything to do with the author I’d been researching. But logic doesn’t always govern these moments, does it? Before I quite knew what I was doing, I’d turned around. I followed him—not closely, not obsessively, just… tracking him through the streets, curious where this phantom Simenon might be headed. What does a writer’s ghost do in a Belgian city on a December afternoon? After a few blocks, I let it go. Felt slightly foolish. Laughed at myself and continued with my day. Then, about thirty minutes later, I turned a corner and there he was again—coming toward me from the opposite direction. This time I saw his face. He was just a man, of course. Not Simenon, not anyone I knew. But he was carrying something: a shopping bag from a bookshop. He’d been buying books. And suddenly it felt less foolish, this chase. Maybe even necessary. Because in that moment, on that street in Ghent, I had followed literature itself through the city. I had tracked the shape of a writer through the form of a reader, and found them exactly where they should be—emerging from a temple of stories, carrying new words home. Simenon understood this, I think—the way people carry mysteries with them just by existing. How a stranger on the street can become a story if you pay attention. How the everyday contains the uncanny if you’re willing to see it. Maigret knew this too. He solved crimes not by brilliant deduction but by watching, by following, by trusting his instincts about what seemed significant even when he couldn’t yet say why. So yes, maybe I did meet Simenon in Belgium. Or at least, I met the echo of him—the idea of the writer as eternal observer, forever watching strangers and wondering about their lives. The detective and the novelist are cousins, after all. Both follow people through cities. Both trust that meaning will reveal itself if you’re patient enough to wait for it. And perhaps that’s exactly the kind of belief this season asks of us. Let me have my delusion, alright? It’s Advent—the time when we’re supposed to trust in things we can’t quite see, in presences that hover just beyond proof. When small miracles arrange themselves like clues, waiting for us to notice the pattern. When a stranger with a bookshop bag can be, for one perfect moment, exactly who we need him to be. Until tomorrow, Alexandra |
Written by Alexandra Poppy
Writer, reader & curator of The Ritual of Reading
I’m Alexandra, the voice behind The Ritual of Reading. Somewhere between a stack of novels and a half-finished pot of tea, I keep finding traces of the life I want to live—slower, richer, filled with stories. The Ritual of Reading is where I gather what I love: books that linger, places with a past, and rituals that make ordinary days feel a little more meaningful. I write from Paris, where elegant bookshops and old-fashioned cafés offer endless inspiration—and I share it here, hoping it brings a spark to your own days, too.
