If you’re coming to Paris because you’ve seen Strasbourg or Nuremberg on Instagram and want that, with wooden chalets, carved ornaments and a cathedral square full of mulled wine steam, Paris will let you down a little.
The markets here are fine. A couple are lovely. But none of them is the reason to come.
The biggest central one, at the Tuileries, is really a funfair with chalets around it. The biggest one overall sits in a business district of glass towers outside the city limits. The nicest one, facing Notre-Dame, has about 40 stalls. Put any of them next to Colmar or Strasbourg and they lose.
And yet December is one of my favourite times to be in Paris. The department store windows on Boulevard Haussmann are the best free Christmas show in town, there’s a 16-metre tree under the Galeries Lafayette dome, Place Vendôme gets its giant trees, the Grand Palais turns into an ice rink under its glass roof, and Notre-Dame is having only its third Christmas since it reopened.
Then there’s the food, which is where Paris really wins. Oysters, foie gras, a bûche de Noël from a pâtissier who clearly lost sleep over it.
So we need to think of Paris as a Christmas city first and a market city second. Use the markets as the thing you do between the windows, the lights and dinner, and you’ll have a great time.
But if you build the whole trip around the chalets, you’ll come home wondering what the fuss was about.
If the markets are the whole point for you, I’d still do Paris, but add a couple of nights in Alsace. Strasbourg is only under two hours away by TGV.
Paris Christmas Markets 2026 at a Glance
La Défense, Notre-Dame and the new Champs-Élysées market have published their 2026 dates so far. Where a market hasn’t announced yet, the table gives last year’s dates as a guide, because they tend to follow the same pattern every year.
| Market | 2026 dates | Size | Best for | My verdict |
| Tuileries | Not announced yet (2025 ran 15 Nov – 4 Jan) | About 80 chalets plus rides | Kids, rides, evening food | Fun, loud, not for gifts |
| La Défense | 12 Nov – 31 Dec, confirmed | 350+ chalets | Size, regional food, skating | The biggest, worth the metro ride |
| Notre-Dame (Square Viviani) | 26 Nov – 27 Dec, confirmed | About 40 chalets, all made in France | Gifts, the view | My favourite |
| Hôtel de Ville, La Forêt Enchantée | Not announced yet (2025 ran 5 Dec – 4 Jan) | 11 chalets | Made-in-Paris gifts, a free carousel | Small and charming |
| Abbesses, Montmartre | Not announced yet (2025 ran 21 Nov – 4 Jan) | About 20 artisans | One-off gifts | Go if you’re in Montmartre anyway |
| Gare de l’Est Alsatian market | Not announced yet (2025 ran 28 Nov – 14 Dec) | About 15 producers | Alsatian food and wine | Short run, very good |
| Place Saint-Michel | Not announced yet (2025 ran 5 Dec – 5 Jan) | About 30 artisans | Crafts on the way to Notre-Dame | Nice add-on |
| Saint-Germain-des-Prés | Not announced yet (2025 ran 25 Nov – 1 Jan) | A short row of chalets | A stop on a Left Bank walk | Only if passing |
| Eiffel Tower village (Quai Branly) | Not announced yet (2025 ran from early December into January) | About 60 chalets | Food with a tower view | Time it for the sparkle |
| Champs-Élysées | 22 Nov – 4 Jan, confirmed | Unknown | Could be the big comeback | Wait and see |
Most of these are free to walk into. You pay for the food, the rides and the rinks.
The Tuileries Market Is a Funfair (and That’s Fine)
When people say “the Paris Christmas market”, this is usually the one they mean.
It runs through the Jardin des Tuileries between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde, and it’s branded La Magie de Noël.
The organiser, Le Monde Festif, hasn’t announced the 2026 dates yet, but it usually opens in mid to late November and runs into the first days of January.
In 2025 it ran from 15 November to 4 January, every day from 11:00 to 23:45, with about 80 chalets, a 250 m² ice rink at €10 with skates, and a Ferris wheel at €15 for adults.
Walk in and you’ll understand the “funfair” thing straight away. There are fairground rides, flashing lights, a big wheel and sugar everywhere, and the chalets squeeze in around all that.
The food is the best part, with raclette, tartiflette, crêpes, oysters and Champagne, and in 2025 the stalls leaned on Alsace, Brittany, Savoy, the Auvergne and the Caribbean.
Expect a vin chaud to cost around €5 to €6. The gifts are mostly the same things you’d find at any travelling market, so I wouldn’t do my shopping here.
It has also been getting smaller. In 2023 there were about 100 chalets and a rink of around 1,200 m². By 2025 it was 80 chalets and 250 m² of ice.
The reason Paris’s big market is a funfair has a story behind it. From 2008 the main market ran along the lower Champs-Élysées, organised by the fairground king Marcel Campion.
In 2017 the city refused to renew his contract, saying the goods and entertainment were of mediocre quality, and a city hall spokesperson summed it up with the line that a €15 cone of churros is “not really the most beautiful showcase of Parisian gastronomy”.
Fairground workers blocked traffic in protest, the courts sided with the city, and in 2018 the market simply moved into the Tuileries, which are run by the Louvre rather than the city.
Campion stepped back later that year and Le Monde Festif has run it since.
The Champs-Élysées story might have one more chapter, too. After nine winters without it, the city has opened the door to a Christmas market on the lower avenue again, confirmed for 22 November 2026 to 4 January 2027.
You should know that the Tuileries gets very crowded. On Friday and Saturday evenings the lanes between the chalets are properly packed, and in 2025 the metro station right next to it, Tuileries on line 1, was closed at weekends from 16:00 because of the crowds.
My advice is to go on a weekday and get there around 16:30. Sunset in mid-December is just before 17:00, so you’ll see the lights come on while the food queues are still short. Get off at Concorde or Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre and walk in.
If you’ve got kids with you, this is the one to do. Everyone else can do it in an hour, eat something hot, and move on.
Notre-Dame and La Défense, the Two I’d Actually Cross Town For
The Notre-Dame market is my favourite in Paris. It sits in Square René-Viviani on the Left Bank, right across the river from the cathedral, and it runs from 26 November to 27 December 2026.
It’s organised by a small association called L’Art et la Seine, and the rule is simple.
Everything has to be made in France. That gives you about 40 chalets of actual crafts and regional food, from foie gras, cheese and nougat to hot chestnuts, plus live music every day from 16:00, with choirs, jazz and brass bands.
Hours are 10:00 to 20:00, and until 21:00 from Friday to Sunday.
The setting does a lot of the work. You’re standing between the chalets looking straight at the front of Notre-Dame, and the square is also home to the oldest tree in Paris, a robinia planted in 1601 by King Henri IV’s herbalist, Jean Robin.
It’s propped up these days and still going. The only downsides are price and space. It’s not a cheap market, and in mid-December the narrow square gets tight, so come on a weekday morning if you want to browse properly.
La Défense is the biggest market in the Paris region, and it’s the one that surprises people.
It sits on the huge esplanade below the Grande Arche, just outside the city limits, surrounded by office towers.
That doesn’t sound very festive, and in some ways it isn’t, as the whole thing feels a bit like a very well-decorated shopping centre.
But the numbers are hard to argue with. There are more than 350 chalets, it runs from 12 November to 31 December 2026 (with its festive zone, Le Sommet, open until 3 January), and it had 2.2 million visitors in 2025, with peaks of 85,000 people a day on the Saturdays in mid-December.
It’s also more of a market than the Tuileries.
There are fewer rides and more food and crafts, with Savoyard, Québécois, Alsatian, Périgord and Creole stalls in 2025, a Savoyard restaurant, and a 540 m² rink of real ice, the first one there in over 20 years.
Skating cost €10 for adults on weekdays before 17:00 and €12.50 in the evenings and at weekends, plus €2.50 for skates.
Bags get checked at the entrances, so leave the big backpack at the hotel.
The best thing about La Défense is how easy it is.
It’s the last stop on metro line 1, a straight ride from the Tuileries on one €2.55 ticket. The 2026 hours are 11:00 to 21:00 Monday to Thursday, 11:00 to 23:00 on Friday, 10:00 to 23:00 on Saturday and 11:00 to 21:30 on Sunday.
It’s also one of the very few markets open on Christmas Day, from 15:00 to 23:00.
The Small Markets (and One to Skip)
The rest of the Paris markets are small, and the good ones are good because they’re small.
La Forêt Enchantée at Hôtel de Ville is the city’s own market, on the square in front of the town hall. In 2025 it ran from 5 December to 4 January, and it’s more of a tiny winter village than a market.
Picture a little forest of real trees that get replanted or turned into mulch for the city’s flower beds afterwards, 11 chalets with makers from Paris and food, and a free old wooden-horse carousel.
It opens later than the others, so save it for the second half of your trip.
The Abbesses market in Montmartre has about 20 French artisans on the village square outside Abbesses metro, and in 2025 it ran from 21 November to 4 January.
It’s a good place for one-off gifts from local designers. Browse it, then walk up the hill to Sacré-Cœur for the view over the lit-up city.
The Alsatian market at Gare de l’Est is the hidden gem, and it’s very easy to miss.
It runs for only about two weeks on the station forecourt (28 November to 14 December in 2025), with around 15 producers selling kougelhopf, bredele biscuits, mannele, Alsatian wine and eaux-de-vie.
It calls itself the oldest Alsatian Christmas market outside Alsace, and 2025 was its 43rd year. If you can’t make it to Strasbourg, this is the closest you’ll get in Paris.
Place Saint-Michel has about 30 artisans run by the Cordonnier family, who have been doing markets since 1869, and it’s a two-minute walk from the Notre-Dame market, so do them together.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés has been running by the church for over 20 years, but it has shrunk to a short row of chalets and isn’t worth a special trip.
The Eiffel Tower village on the Quai Branly side has about 60 chalets and puts food first. Go after dark and time your visit for the hour, when the tower sparkles for five minutes.
There’s also a small one I really like that hardly anyone mentions.
The Swedish Church in the 17th holds a Christmas bazaar for one weekend at the end of November (28 to 30 November in 2025), with cinnamon buns, herring, lingonberries and Swedish mulled wine.
On 13 December the same church celebrates Lucia.
And the one to skip, or at least to check first, is the Swiss Christmas village at La Villette.
In 2025 it started charging €5 at the door at busy times halfway through the season, which caused hour-long queues and a small online storm.
It has a Ferris wheel and a fondue chalet, but nothing you can’t get for free elsewhere.
What Paris Does Better Than Its Markets
The department store windows. Galeries Lafayette and Printemps stand side by side on Boulevard Haussmann, and every November both unveil animated Christmas windows.
Galeries Lafayette has been doing them since 1976. In 2025 Printemps went with “A Christmas in New York”, with 11 animated windows and 125 little characters that took a team of 150 people a year to make.
Inside Galeries Lafayette, the tree under the stained-glass dome is the star. In 2025 it was 16 metres tall with 8 km of LED garlands and a light and sound show every half hour. It’s free to see, and it’s the Christmas photo half of Paris seems to be taking.
Le Bon Marché on the Left Bank does its own windows too, and in 2025 it built a little Alsatian-style village of chalets inside the store, which beats some of the outdoor markets.
The 2026 themes haven’t been announced yet, but the windows usually open in early to mid November and stay up until the end of December.
Skating on the rooftops. In 2025 both stores had rinks on their roofs.
The Galeries Lafayette one cost €16 for about 30 minutes, and the Printemps one was free but booked out fast.
Skating above Paris with the Opéra Garnier next to you is hard to beat.
The lights. The Champs-Élysées gets about 400 lit trees from mid-November to early January, switched on each year by a celebrity (Léa Seydoux in 2025), and in 2025 they stayed lit from 17:00 until midnight, and until 1:00 on Fridays and Saturdays.
But the avenue is only the start. Place Vendôme gets eight giant trees, Avenue Montaigne dresses its luxury shopfronts, and Boulevard Haussmann has its own lights over the stores.
Down on the river, the Eiffel Tower sparkles for five minutes every hour after dark.
The Grand Palais de Glace. This is the big one for 2026. The Grand Palais, freshly restored, turns its nave into an ice rink of about 2,700 m² under that huge glass and iron roof, from 13 December 2026 to 6 January 2027.
Morning sessions cost €27 for adults, afternoons €32, and the evening session with DJs is €39, running until 1:00.
Tickets go on sale in mid-October, and I’d book as soon as they do. On 24 and 31 December it closes at 18:00.
The light trails. The Jardin des Plantes does a night-time light festival every winter, from Wednesday to Sunday between 18:00 and 22:00 and daily in the Christmas holidays, and the Jardin d’Acclimatation does its own.
Both are good if you’ve got kids and have already done the Tuileries.
Notre-Dame at Christmas
After the fire in 2019, Notre-Dame reopened in December 2024, which makes 2026 only its third Christmas back.
If you’re in Paris on the 24th, going to a Christmas service here is something you’ll remember for a long time.
The Christmas masses don’t need booking. In 2025 there were masses at 16:00, 18:00 and 20:00 on Christmas Eve, a vigil with the cathedral choir at 23:00 and then midnight mass, plus several services on Christmas Day, including an international mass at 11:30.
The 2026 times aren’t out yet, but they’ll likely follow the same pattern. Space is limited (in 2024 it was about 2,700 people), so arrive well before the start, use the central entrance on the forecourt, and expect a queue.
If you’d rather hear music than sit through a mass, the cathedral has Christmas concerts on 15 and 16 December 2026 at 20:30, with the cathedral choir and the organists Olivier Latry and Yves Castagnet, and tickets from €15 to €40.
The Christmas crib is set up in the north ambulatory from late November to early February. In 2025 it was a Provençal nativity with more than 50 clay santons from Arles.
Visiting the cathedral is free. You can just queue, but in the holidays that can take one to two hours, so book a free time slot on the official site, which opens a couple of days ahead. On Thursdays it stays open until 22:00, and walking in on a quiet December evening is one of the best things you can do in Paris at Christmas. Then walk out, cross the Pont au Double and have a vin chaud at the market facing it.
Eat Christmas the Paris Way
Paris’s Christmas markets are average. Paris’s Christmas food is anything but.
The bûche de Noël is the Christmas cake, a rolled log of sponge and cream, and in Paris the big hotels and pâtissiers treat it like fashion week.
Every year they bring out designer bûches, and in 2025 they went from €55 for Abra’s bûche designed as a map of Paris to €150 for Nina Métayer’s giant bauble.
The Plaza Athénée called its version La Patinoire, the ice rink, and charged €130 for it. You don’t need to spend that much, as any good local bakery does a proper bûche, but the designer ones are fun to go and look at in the shop windows. Most need ordering a few days ahead.
Le réveillon is the big dinner on Christmas Eve, and it’s where the French go all out. Think oysters, smoked salmon, scallops, snails and foie gras to start, then capon or turkey with chestnuts, then cheese, then the bûche with Champagne.
Plenty of restaurants do a set réveillon menu on the 24th, and the good ones book up early. New Year’s Eve, the Saint-Sylvestre, gets the same treatment.
At the markets you’ll pay around €4 to €6 for a vin chaud, about €5 for a crêpe and €10 to €15 for a raclette sandwich. For a hot chocolate, go to Angelina on Rue de Rivoli, right across from the Tuileries.
It has been making its famously thick “L’Africain” since 1903, and a cup there after the market is the best way to warm up. Expect a queue at weekends.
In January the bakeries switch to the galette des rois, a puff pastry cake filled with almond cream with a little porcelain figure, the fève, hidden inside.
Tradition says the youngest person sits under the table and calls out who gets each slice, and whoever finds the fève wears the paper crown.
You’ll start seeing them in the windows from the last days of December.
Getting Between the Markets
Paris makes this easy, because the main markets hang off one metro line. Line 1 runs from La Défense straight through Concorde and Tuileries to Palais Royal and Hôtel de Ville.
The Notre-Dame and Saint-Michel markets are 10 to 15 minutes’ walk from Hôtel de Ville over the bridges, and Saint-Germain is another 15 minutes west.
A single ticket costs €2.55, and paper tickets are gone, so load them onto a Navigo Easy card or use your phone.
The simplest way to do it is to split the city into a day on the Left Bank and an evening on the Right Bank.
| When | Route | Why |
| Morning to afternoon | Notre-Dame market → Place Saint-Michel → Saint-Germain-des-Prés → Le Bon Marché | Crafts and gifts while it’s quiet, then the store’s Christmas village |
| Late afternoon | Galeries Lafayette dome and the Haussmann windows → Place Vendôme | The windows and the tree, then the giant trees on the square |
| Dusk and evening | Tuileries market → Concorde → Champs-Élysées lights | Rides and hot food as the lights come on, then the avenue |
| Any other day | Line 1 to La Défense | Give it a few hours of its own |
Keep an eye on your phone and wallet. Crowded markets and metro line 1 are exactly where pickpockets like to work in December, so keep bags zipped and in front of you, especially around the Tuileries on weekend evenings.
And remember the Tuileries metro station closed at weekends from 16:00 during the 2025 market, so plan to use Concorde or Palais Royal instead.
Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve in Paris
In 2026 Christmas Eve is a Thursday and Christmas Day is a Friday.
Most markets close early on the 24th, a few stay open on the 25th, and the museums are the ones that catch people out.
| What | 24 Dec | 25 Dec | 31 Dec |
| La Défense market (2026) | 11:00–18:00 | 15:00–23:00 | 11:00–18:00 |
| Tuileries market (2025 hours) | Closed at 19:30 | Open | Closed at 19:30 |
| Notre-Dame market (2026) | Not published yet | Not published yet | Closed (ends 27 Dec) |
| Hôtel de Ville village (2025 hours) | Closed at 19:00 | Open | Not published |
| Place Saint-Michel (2025 hours) | 10:00–18:00 | 10:00–18:00 | 10:00–18:00 |
| Grand Palais de Glace (2026) | Closes at 18:00 | Open | Closes at 18:00 |
| Louvre and Musée d’Orsay | Open | Closed | Open |
| Eiffel Tower | Open | Open | Open, last entry early evening |
On Christmas Day most shops and a lot of museums are closed, including the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Rodin and the Picasso museum.
The Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Cœur stay open, so they’re good Christmas Day plans, along with a long lunch somewhere that’s taking bookings.
New Year’s Eve is a big night on the Champs-Élysées. In 2025 there was a light show projected onto the Arc de Triomphe from 23:50 and fireworks at midnight.
Don’t wait for fireworks at the Eiffel Tower, as it only does those on 14 July.
Last New Year’s Eve, public transport was free across Paris from 17:00 on the 31st until noon on 1 January, and several metro lines, including line 1, ran all night, although the stations around the Champs-Élysées closed from mid-afternoon for security.
When to Go
For me the best window is roughly 7 to 16 December, on weekdays.
By then everything is open, including the Hôtel de Ville village, which usually starts in early December, and the Alsatian market at Gare de l’Est, which usually finishes mid-month.
The windows are up, the Grand Palais rink opens on the 13th, and the Notre-Dame concerts are on the 15th and 16th.
Late November is quieter, but you’ll miss a few of the smaller markets.
Avoid Saturdays in mid-December if you can. That’s when La Défense hit 85,000 visitors a day in 2025, and when the Tuileries is at its most packed.
Paris in December is cold and damp rather than snowy. The average high is around 8°C and the low around 4°C, it rains on about 11 days in the month, and snow falls most winters but rarely sticks.
Sunset is just before 17:00 in mid-December, which works in your favour, as the lights come on while the shops are still open.
Is Paris Worth It at Christmas? (And Paris vs Alsace)
Yes, absolutely, as long as you come for Paris and not for the markets.
If you want the windows, the lights, Notre-Dame, the Grand Palais on ice and the best Christmas food in Europe, with a few good markets thrown in, December is one of the best times of the year to be here.
If you want the proper German-style Christmas market, with half-timbered houses, carved wooden ornaments and a town that feels like it was built for December, that’s Alsace. Colmar’s Christmas markets are half an hour further south. If you only have a day, Reims and Lille are closer still.
| From Paris | By train | Why go |
| Reims | About 45 minutes from Gare de l’Est | The easiest day trip, with Champagne on the side |
| Lille | About 1 hour from Gare du Nord | A better market than anything in Paris, an hour away |
| Strasbourg | Under 2 hours from Gare de l’Est | Ten markets, trading since 1570 |
| Colmar | About half an hour past Strasbourg | The fairytale one |
The trip I’d plan is three or four nights in Paris for everything above, then the train east for two nights in Strasbourg or Colmar.
You get the best Christmas city and the best Christmas markets in one week, and you only move hotels once.
For more ideas, here are the rest of the Christmas markets in France.
