Christmas in Paris is a liberatingly unsentimental affair which lasts for less than 24 hours - basically from midnight on the 24th until after lunch on the 25th.

Like in most other countries a French Christmas celebration can be summed up as food, food, gifts and more food,  with frenzied last minute shopping on  Christmas Eve and, in a traditional French household, an elaborate late supper after Midnight Mass or a long Christmas Day lunch, sometimes both.

Cure against x-mas blues

A visitor does not need to feel excluded or lonely in Paris during the holidays.  This city harbors so many traditions and religions that many Parisians are not even concerned by Christmas.  Shops stay open late on Christmas Eve and restaurants serve into the night as usual, though often with higher priced special menus.  And Paris is still a place where even a woman need have no qualms about dining out alone at Christmas - or any other day of the year for that matter - whether in a three-star restaurant or a neighborhood bistrot.

Museums are closed on the 25th, but keep normal hours on the 24th. Theaters stay open on Christmas Eve and some of them give a matinée performance on Christmas Day but usually not that evening.  Movies, on the other hand, are shown on both days.  Buses and metros run on the 24th but on the 25th they apply Sunday schedules.  Unless it falls on a Sunday, December 26 is just another working day. 

Surprisingly many people, if asked,  would admit that Christmas can be an emotionally difficult time of the year.  Anyone who wants to escape The Big X-mas Blues, be she/he alone or accompanied, could not choose a better place than Paris.   It totally lacks the oppressive Christmas sentimentalism so common in some North-European countries. 

Hot pink against recession fears

With its year-end illuminations the City of Light lives up to its fame.  Officially appointed French light artists are indeed genuine artists and seldom guilty of the kind of gaudiness all too often seen in other places.  To combat the general gloom caused by a worrying economic climate,  the City authorities have this year decided on fuchsia pink as the theme color on Avenue des Champs Elysées.  A stroll along the elegant avenue with its more than 400 illuminated trees  is a "must".  With, if possible, a trip up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe from where Paris shows its most attractive face.  The perspective from the Arc is much more interesting than from the Eiffel Tower. Haussmann's brightly lit avenues stretch out from what used to be called Place de l'Etoile (now Place Charles de Gaulle) like the points of a star - hence its old name  “étoile".