France at Christmas Travel Guide

🧭 Why you need it

France's expensive mistakes are regional ones. Book Boxing Day in Colmar and the whole town is shut, because 26 December is a public holiday in Alsace and Moselle and an ordinary working day in Paris and Lille; drive out to Kaysersberg midweek and its market runs Friday to Sunday in most years; land in Strasbourg on the afternoon of the 24th and the chalets close at 18:00. This guide is the briefing that stops all of that, market by market, with each one's usual pattern and its last day.

✨ What’s inside

• StrasbourgEight separate markets on one island, running since 1570, open 11:30-21:00 daily and closing at 18:00 on 24 December. Includes the Marché OFF, built from shipping containers, that no coach tour reaches.
• ColmarAround 200 chalets across five squares against half-timbering that survived the war, and it keeps going to about 30 December - which makes the week after Christmas the quiet, cheap version of it.
• The Wine-Route VillagesRiquewihr, Kaysersberg, Eguisheim, Ribeauvillé and Turckheim have no railway station, several finish about 20 December and some open weekends only. Hire a car for one day, and do two villages, not four.
• Lyon & the Fête des LumièresFour free nights around 8 December, about two million people, and works running roughly 19:00 to 23:00 - plus the candles in ordinary windows the whole thing grew out of. Book beds the summer before.
• Mulhouse, Metz & NancyNancy's Saint Nicolas float parade draws around 150,000 and runs on the first weekend of December, not the 6th. Metz runs to 31 December with its lantern trail; Mulhouse dresses its market in a new printed cloth every year.
• Paris in DecemberThe markets are honestly not the reason to come. The Galeries Lafayette dome and the Haussmann windows are free, La Défense is the one Parisians actually shop at, and métro Line 1 is where the pickpockets are.
• Provence - Santons & Thirteen DessertsThe other French Christmas: hand-painted clay figures of the whole village, the fairs at Marseille, Aix, Arles and Aubagne, and thirteen desserts left out on three tablecloths until the 27th.
• Beyond the Markets & What Shuts26 December is a public holiday in Alsace and Moselle and an ordinary working day everywhere else in France, which is the single most expensive thing to get wrong about your dates.
• The Cup, the Hour & the BorderThe gobelet is a €1 deposit on a plain reusable cup, returnable at any drinks chalet, and nobody collects them. Plus the arrival hour that decides the evening: 15:30, for the lights at 17:00.

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