Christmas in Paris 2026: what's on, when, and where to stay

In the second week of November, on boulevard Haussmann. Galeries Lafayette has dressed the store, the windows and the tree under its Art Nouveau dome in Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's colours this year, and its own Christmas heritage tours, which take in the windows and the tree, start on Saturday 14 November; the press puts the unveiling on Thursday 12 November from 6pm. Printemps, next door, usually unveils its windows in November; it had announced no 2026 date when we checked on 31 October.

The Tuileries fair is reported to open on 14 November, and the main event follows on Sunday 22 November, when the lights go on along the Champs-Élysées, staying up to early January, Paris je t'aime says; the avenue is reported to close to traffic for the evening. The same day the Christmas market returns to the lower end of the avenue, by place de la Concorde, until 4 January. Galeries Lafayette opens its rooftop rink, with the Eiffel Tower on the skyline, on 24 November, the Notre-Dame market fills Square René Viviani from 26 November, and the Grand Palais lays the world's largest indoor rink, as its organiser bills it, under its glass roof from 12 December. The season ends with fireworks over the Arc de Triomphe at midnight on Thursday 31 December.

Yes, four of them, all in the five nights from 17 to 20 December, as Fever listed them on 31 October 2026. The one we would book is the Christmas Music Special in the Salon Gustave Eiffel, on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower: a string quartet, Ensemble Paname on 18 and 19 December and the Agence Musicale de Paris on the 20th, plays from Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Carol of the Bells to Let It Snow, Last Christmas and All I Want for Christmas Is You, with the lift up included in the ticket. It held 4.8 from 69 reviews on Fever. The same salon has Original Soundtracks from Christmas Films on 19 and 20 December at 18:00: White Christmas, the Grinch, Home Alone's Carol of the Bells and Love Actually's All I Want for Christmas Is You.

The best value is Candlelight: Christmas music at Maison de l'Océan in the Latin Quarter: a string quartet plays Corelli's Christmas Concerto, Vivaldi's Winter and carols from Angels We Have Heard on High to O Holy Night, from €22.05, rated 4.6 from 271 reviews. At the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles near Invalides, the pianist Maxime Zecchini gives the Christmas programme on 19 and 20 December, from Once Upon a December and the Nutcracker to Clair de Lune and Silent Night, with every seat in the cheapest category at €38.85, rated 4.7 from 44 reviews.

Fever's year-round Candlelight programme carries on through December at the same three venues, and these are its dates from 1 December to 2 January as Fever listed them on 31 October, with the cheapest seat on any of those dates. The tower's Salon Gustave Eiffel is the grand one, from about €70; Maison de l'Océan, the 1911 Institut océanographique on rue Saint-Jacques, is the bargain, from about €22; the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles on boulevard des Invalides sits in between.

Christmas week is thin. The Einaudi tribute plays the Eiffel Tower on 23 December, The Four Seasons and Hans Zimmer play it on Saturday 26 December, Coldplay vs Imagine Dragons on the 27th, and Bruno Mars opens 2027 at the Institut at 19:30 on 1 January. There is no Candlelight in Paris on 24, 25 or 31 December.

Two of our Paris things to do run through Christmas week. Les Origines de Paris is an hour's guided walk along the right-bank quays below the Hôtel de Ville, from Pont Louis-Philippe towards the Île Saint-Louis, raising a virtual reality viewer at each stop to see the same spot as Roman Lutetia, under the Viking siege, in the Middle Ages or in the 1910 flood. It is rated 4.8 from 4,140 reviews on Fever and costs €29 with the fee for adults and €20 for children of 8 to 15. When we read Fever's calendar on 31 October, December had sessions on the weekends of 5 and 6 and 12 and 13 December, then every day from 19 to 31 December except Christmas Day (check the calendar before you go), with departures every half hour from 10:00 to 17:30; Christmas Eve has morning departures only, to 11:30. On 21 December the sun sets at about 16:56, so the 16:30 and 17:00 departures finish along the river as the lights come on.

Wine tasting at Les Caves du Louvre is the adults' hour underground: a sommelier takes you through the cellars at 52 rue de l'Arbre Sec, two streets from the Louvre, and pours three wines, for €50 with no booking fee, rated 4.5 from 1,205 reviews. It runs every day in December except the 25th, with English sessions from 14:00 to 17:00 on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, and French ones to 18:15. Hôtel Madame Rêve is about seven minutes' walk away and Le Grand Mazarin about 14.

Friday 25 December is a public holiday in France, and it is the quietest day of the season on Fever: none of our three Paris things to do had a session that day. The rinks and one market carry on, though. The Grand Palais rink's organiser lists only two early closings in its whole run, at 6pm on 24 and 31 December, and the City of Paris gives the Notre-Dame market's hours for every day of the week to 27 December, with no Christmas Day closure. So Christmas Day can be the lights on the Champs-Élysées at dusk, the Notre-Dame market in the afternoon and a skate under the Grand Palais's glass roof at night.

Christmas Eve is a working day: Les Origines de Paris runs in the morning, Les Caves du Louvre in the afternoon, and the Grand Palais rink until 6pm. Saturday 26 December brings Candlelight back to the Eiffel Tower, with The Four Seasons at 18:00 and Hans Zimmer at 20:30.

New Year's Eve is free and needs no ticket. Last year, as paris.fr set it out, the Champs-Élysées opened to the public at 7pm, entered mainly from place de la Concorde and from avenue Montaigne, avenue Matignon and avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt; at 23:50 a video mapping was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe, and at midnight the fireworks began, and the evening ended at 00:20. The 2026 programme is not yet published. Make an afternoon of it first: the Caves du Louvre pours until 18:15 and the Grand Palais rink is open until 6pm.

In our edit, Le Bristol Paris. From its door on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré it is six minutes on foot to the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, the middle of the lit stretch of the avenue, and ten to the Grand Palais rink, and its 1,200 m² garden and sixth-floor pool make the warm end of a cold evening. The Hôtel de Crillon stands on place de la Concorde itself, four minutes from the foot of the avenue and the Christmas market, 11 minutes from both the Tuileries and the Grand Palais rink, 13 from the Rond-Point and 13 from Printemps.

For the windows and the tree on boulevard Haussmann, Grands Boulevards Experimental, at 17 boulevard Poissonnière, is 14 minutes on foot from Galeries Lafayette and 18 from Printemps, and Le Pigalle, on rue Frochot in South Pigalle, is 15 and 18 minutes away, downhill there. Hôtel Madame Rêve, in the old Louvre post office at Les Halles, sits between everything: 22 minutes from Galeries Lafayette, 20 from the Tuileries, 24 from the Notre-Dame market and seven from the Caves du Louvre.

Yes, if you want the season without the Champs-Élysées every evening, and it is where our records show December at its kindest. Le Grand Mazarin, Martin Brudnizki's maximalist hotel on the corner of rue de la Verrerie and rue des Archives, is 14 minutes on foot from the Notre-Dame market and about seven from the meeting point for Les Origines de Paris under Pont Louis-Philippe, and the Caves du Louvre are 14 minutes away. On its own booking calendar, read on 7 October 2026, the cheapest one-night room-only price had a December median of €670, against €1,074 in October and €675 in November. For the lights, line 1 runs from Hôtel de Ville to Concorde and the Champs-Élysées.

Le Pavillon de la Reine, behind the arcades of the Place des Vosges, is the other Marais choice: its own calendar averaged €763 a night for December against €1,162 in October and €900 in November, and its courtyard garden is strung with lights by December. On the Left Bank, Mandarin Oriental Lutetia, Paris is nine minutes from place Saint-Germain-des-Prés and faces Square Boucicaut and Le Bon Marché across the road, with the Christmas piano Candlelight at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles a 14-minute walk away. The Paris city tax for a five-star hotel, €11.70 per adult per night, and for a Palace, €15.93, is charged on top.

Cool, often damp and rarely snowy. Over the five Decembers from 2021 to 2025, central Paris averaged a high of 9°C (48°F) and a low of 4°C (39°F), with frost on about seven nights of the month and no day that stayed below freezing. Rain is the likelier spoiler, about 69 mm on 13 days of the month, and snow was rare: under 2 cm in a month on average, and on Christmas Day only a trace, in 2025, when the day stayed between -2°C and 2°C. The other four Christmas Days were mild, with highs of 10°C to 13°C.

The days are short: about eight and a quarter hours from sunrise at about 08:40 to sunset just before 17:00 on the shortest days, with about three of them in sunshine, which is why the lights matter. For New Year's Eve, the midnight temperature in those five years ran from -1°C on 1 January 2026, when it felt like -4°C, to 15°C in 2023. Dress for standing still outdoors: layers, a waterproof and a hat, since paris.fr advises warm and rainproof clothing for the evening.

Partly, and it is free. For the night of 31 December 2025, Île-de-France Mobilités, the region's transport authority, whose metro and RER are run by RATP and SNCF, made the whole network free from 5pm on 31 December to noon on 1 January, airports excepted. From 2.15am to 5.30am on 1 January six metro lines kept running through the night, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9 and 14, at selected stations, RER A and B ran in both directions to every station, and the night buses ran as on a weekend night. The 2026 plan is usually published in the last days of December.

The all-night stations sit close to our hotels: Concorde and Franklin D. Roosevelt on line 1 for the Hôtel de Crillon and Le Bristol Paris, Grands Boulevards on line 9 for Grands Boulevards Experimental, Pigalle on line 2 for Le Pigalle, Châtelet and Les Halles for Hôtel Madame Rêve and Le Grand Mazarin, Bastille for Le Pavillon de la Reine and Trocadéro for Shangri-La Paris. On the evening itself, paris.fr listed the stations it closed around the avenue for security: Charles de Gaulle Étoile and Argentine from 2pm, and from 4pm Concorde, Champs-Élysées Clemenceau, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George V, Tuileries and others, with several reopening at about 1am.

For 24 and 25 December, RATP had published no special service when we checked, and its websites refused our reader. Plan those days in the Île-de-France Mobilités or RATP app; most of what this guide covers is within a walk of our central hotels.