I have one rule for Christmas in Paris. I do not book anything for December 25 until I have read the words on the venue’s own website with my own eyes. Not a listicle. Not a screenshot of last year’s hours. The website.
In This Post
- Why This Guide Has Fewer Dates Than You Expected
- The Markets, and What They Actually Are
- The Lights Are the Actual Event
- What Is Actually Closed on December 25
- Christmas Eve Is the Real Meal
- Midnight Mass, Realistically
- How I Would Actually Spend December 25
- Is Paris Worth It at Christmas
- Frequently Asked Questions
It sounds paranoid. It is not. It is the difference between a good Christmas Day and standing outside a locked museum in the rain with two adults who are both pretending they are fine.
So that is how this guide is written. Everything below is either something I checked on an official site in September 2026, or it is clearly labeled as last season’s shape, which is what you plan around until Paris confirms. If you want the wider month (weather, crowds, admission prices, how short the days get) that is in our guide to Paris in December. This one is the Christmas half.
Why This Guide Has Fewer Dates Than You Expected
On September 4, 2026 I sat down to pull the 2026 Christmas dates and came up with almost nothing.
Paris La Defense had no market page and no dates. The Comite des Champs-Elysees had nothing about the illuminations. The Grand Palais program ran out at the end of September. Time Out Paris, which is usually first with this, was still serving its guide from November 2025.
That is not an oversight on their end. Paris confirms Christmas in late October and November, every year, and it moves. Which means every article you are about to read that confidently gives you 2026 market dates in September is copying last year’s numbers and hoping. I would rather hand you last season’s confirmed shape, tell you it is last season’s, and let you check.
Slightly less satisfying. Considerably more useful in January when you are not standing in front of a padlocked chalet row.
The Markets, and What They Actually Are
The big one in the Paris region is not in Paris. The Marche de Noel de La Defense sets up on the Parvis de La Defense out in Puteaux, and in 2025 it ran November 13 through December 28, open 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday, 11 to 10 on Thursday, and 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Yes, it is a Christmas market at the foot of a cluster of office towers. It is also genuinely the best one, because it is big enough to have variety instead of forty identical stalls, and because it stays open until the end of December when the central ones start folding up.
Now the part I want to be honest about. The tourist-facing Paris markets are, with real affection, a bit of a racket. Mulled wine, churros, a stall selling scented candles, another one selling the same scented candles. If you have done a German Christmas market you will find these thin, and I say that as someone who will happily accept a paper cup of hot wine as dinner.
The better ones in Paris are small, independent and mostly last a single day. Time Out’s own 2025 roundup was almost entirely those: a market at Ground Control on rue de Charolais in the 12th, one at Point Ephemere on the quai de Valmy, a record sale on boulevard Richard-Lenoir, a market on the tiny rue du Nil in the 2nd.
My pick out of that list is Tram 130 on rue Saint-Maur in the 11th, which in 2025 ran December 10 through 23 from 6 p.m. to midnight. An evening market, in the 11th, that treats Christmas shopping as a night out rather than a chore. That is the one I would build an evening around.
The Lights Are the Actual Event
If you take one thing from this post, take this. The markets are fine. The lights are the reason to be here.
Boulevard Haussmann is the anchor. For the 2025 season the display ran 414,000 LEDs through the trees plus a tunnel of another 15,200, and it stayed lit until January 11, 2026. Galeries Lafayette and Printemps face each other across that stretch and both do animated windows every year, at kid height, free, with a queue that moves. In 2025 Galeries Lafayette worked with the Belgian illustrator Tom Schamp and Printemps ran 92 animated characters through sea, mountain and forest sets.
Go inside Galeries Lafayette while you are there, and look up. That stained glass dome is the single best free thing on the boulevard and about half the people on the sidewalk outside never walk in. The Christmas tree hangs under it. My husband and I have stood in that atrium with our necks cricked back like a pair of tourists, which is exactly what we were.
Two more that carried real 2025 programming. La Samaritaine did an immersive installation by Elsa Tomkowiak under the theme “Paris m’emballe.” And the Hotel de Ville put an illuminated forest, a village, carousels and a crafts market on its forecourt, which is the closest thing central Paris has to a proper Christmas set piece.
Timing matters more than people think. The sun sets in Paris at 4:55 p.m. on December 11 and 4:58 p.m. on the solstice, so the lights are doing their job from about five. That is also when every other person in the 9th arrondissement decides to see them. Boulevard Haussmann between five and eight on a December Saturday is a crush, and not a charming one. Go on a weeknight, or go at nine when the shopping crowd has thinned and the lights are still on. If you are still choosing a base, our guide to where to stay in Paris flags which neighborhoods put you inside walking distance of all this.
What Is Actually Closed on December 25
This is the section I would print out. Christmas Day 2026 is a Friday, and December 25 is a national public holiday in France. December 26 is a holiday too, but only in Alsace and the Moselle, so it means nothing in Paris.
Closed on December 25, stated in plain language on their own sites when I checked in September 2026:
- The Louvre. Closed January 1, May 1 and December 25. It also closes every Tuesday, and in 2026 that makes December 22, December 25 and December 29 all dark. Three closed days in eight.
- Sainte-Chapelle. Same three dates. In winter it runs 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. anyway, so it is a morning plan or nothing.
- The Notre-Dame towers. Same three dates. Winter hours 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., booking required, and the route is 424 steps.
- Versailles. Closed December 25 and January 1, plus every Monday.
Open on December 25, or at least open last year:
- Sacre-Coeur. Open every day without exception, 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., and the basilica visit is free. This is the reliable one.
- The Arc de Triomphe. December 25 is not on its annual closure list, and its own practical-information page shows it opened on December 25, 2025 and January 1, 2026 with shortened hours of 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., last admission 4:30. The 2026 holiday hours were not posted as of September 2026. Check before you walk over. Also, the lift was out of service with no restart date, so the terrace is stairs only.
One more that catches people every single year. The Centre Pompidou is not shut for the holiday, it is shut full stop. It closed to the public on September 22, 2025 for a renovation running to 2030. If it was on your Christmas list, take it off.
Christmas Eve Is the Real Meal
Americans get this backwards, and I did too the first year. In France the event is the 24th. The reveillon is a long, late, sit-down dinner on Christmas Eve, and the 25th is the quiet day after, spent horizontal.
Which changes your planning in two ways.
One, restaurants that open on the 24th almost always switch to a fixed menu for the night, priced per person, and they book out. Not “call that afternoon” book out. Weeks. If you are travelling on the 24th and you have not reserved, you are eating whatever is near your hotel, and I have done that, and it was a sad plate of pasta I still think about.
Two, a lot of neighborhood places then close entirely on the 25th, because the staff have families. So the 25th is the day to have a plan, not the day to wander and see what looks good. Book something. Anything. Read the actual menu first, because a set holiday menu is a different price from a Tuesday.
If you want to know what tends to be on that menu, it runs oysters, foie gras, a capon or a roast bird, and a buche de Noel at the end, which is a rolled sponge cake dressed up as a log and is somehow always better than it sounds. For the rest of the trip, our list of cheap eats in Paris that are actually good is the one I lean on, because a holiday dinner and a week of holiday dinners are very different budgets.
Midnight Mass, Realistically
Notre-Dame reopened on December 7 and 8, 2024, five and a half years after the fire, and the Crown of Thorns came back to the cathedral on December 13 that year. Christmas 2026 will be the third one since it reopened.
So yes, the answer everyone wants is that Midnight Mass at Notre-Dame is a real option again. Here is my honest read on whether you should build a night around it. Demand for that cathedral has been extraordinary since it came back, the Christmas schedule publishes late in the autumn, and the arrangements have changed from one year to the next. I am not going to give you a time in September for a service in December. The cathedral posts its own schedule and that is the only source I would trust.
What I would say is that if you go, go for the service and not for the photograph, arrive absurdly early, and have a second church in your back pocket. Paris has hundreds of them and most will have something on. Sacre-Coeur stays open to 10:30 p.m. every night of the year, which makes it the easiest fallback in the city.
How I Would Actually Spend December 25
Built only out of things that were confirmed open when I checked, which is the whole idea.
Start at Sacre-Coeur early, while Montmartre is still half asleep and the hill is yours. Walk down through the streets behind it rather than the tourist staircase. Have a long booked lunch somewhere you chose in November. Then take the afternoon slowly, because the light is gone by five anyway, and end on Boulevard Haussmann with the windows and the trees.
What I would not attempt on the 25th is a museum day. Between the Louvre being shut, Versailles being shut, Sainte-Chapelle being shut and Pompidou being shut until 2030, you are planning around a very short list. Save the museums for the 26th, when everything reopens and half the city is out shopping anyway. If you want the museum-heavy version of this trip, that is what our December guide and our 25 best things to do in Paris are for.
Is Paris Worth It at Christmas
Yes, with one honest caveat. If you are coming for chalets and mulled wine, Strasbourg and half of Germany do that better and it is not close. Paris at Christmas is not a market city. It is a lights city, a restaurant city and a walking-around-in-the-dark-at-five-in-the-afternoon city, and on those terms it is one of my favorite places in the world to be in late December. If what you actually want is spectacle at scale, Christmas in New York is the other trip, and it is a completely different animal.
If you only have one evening, spend it on Boulevard Haussmann. Windows at Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, ten minutes under the dome with your head tipped back, then walk south toward the Opera with the trees lit above you. That is the whole thing in ninety minutes and it costs nothing.
And book the 24th. I am begging you.
Cheers!
Antonina
Frequently Asked Questions
No. The Louvre states on its own site that it closes on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. It also closes every Tuesday, which in 2026 means the museum is dark on December 22, December 25 and December 29. Sainte-Chapelle, the Notre-Dame towers and the Palace of Versailles are also closed on December 25.
Sacre-Coeur is the reliable one. The basilica is open every day without exception from 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and the visit is free. The Arc de Triomphe is not on any annual closure list and opened on December 25, 2025 with shortened hours of 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., last admission 4:30, though as of September 2026 its 2026 holiday hours had not been posted.
Paris confirms its Christmas dates in late October and November, so anything published earlier is guesswork. For reference, the biggest one in the region, the market on the Parvis de La Defense, ran from November 13 to December 28 in 2025. Check the venue’s own site before you plan around a date.
Christmas Eve. In France the reveillon on December 24 is the main meal, and restaurants that open switch to a fixed menu and book out weeks ahead. Many neighborhood places then close on the 25th, so reserve something for both nights rather than planning to wander and see what is open.
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