Last December, I found a Christmas Market in an unexpected place, had a great time soaking in the joy of the locals and enjoyed a veritable Alsatian Meat Fest for dinner.
The backstory: I was onboarding a new employee in Paris at around this time last year and had two nights at a hotel in the La Defense business and shopping district. I talked about La Defense a bit in this 2019 post.
My hotel was connected to the CNIT Convention and Shopping Center, which was all dolled up for Christmas and full of shoppers scurrying hither and thither.
On my first night in Paris, there was a lovely team dinner at The French Paradox, AKA Canard and Champagne. It’s a wonderful restaurant in the Passage des Panoramas that I’ve mentioned here before, but I haven’t done a full restaurant rave about it yet.
But that will be another post. This one is about the La Defense Christmas Market.
On my second night in Paris, I was too tired to venture far from my hotel, with a very early wakeup call looming for a very early flight. But there was a Christmas market just outside my hotel – what an obvious choice! I was surprised that a substantial Christmas market would be located there, because La Defense is a business and convention district with some shopping and a few restaurants for the daytime workers rather than a mixed-use everything-you-can-imagine-plus-amazing-history-is-within-a-few-steps area like most of central Paris. As one of the articles about it said, “you’re not going to happen to stroll by it as you explore the city”. I wouldn’t have thought it would draw thousands of Parisians when there are so many other recreational choices in so many other more charming areas (IMHO) across the City of Lights.
Boy, was I wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s the biggest Christmas market in Paris, and draws over 1.5 million attendees per year. Not just attendees, happy and delighted patrons. This Christmas market was a Parisian party. It didn’t hurt that Paris had won a big World Cup match against Morocco the night before. Everyone was singing and dancing and glad to be alive.
I wandered around in this wondrous atmosphere rich with holiday cheer, uplifted, no longer tired. The joyful nature of the vendors and the crowd was contagious, and I can still feel the energy and spirit. I went to four Christmas markets last December, and this one was definitely the most memorable.
Eventually, though, I was cold. Happy, but cold.
Time for a rest and a ‘snack’. I was lured into an Alsation pop-up restaurant within the festival.
The snack was more of a Meat Fest. That seems to be a holiday tradition in Europe.
The “maitre ‘d” talked me into this dish, Choucroute Royale, but I make no apologies. When in Rome, right?
Other than the fact that the food was all similarly colored in the beige-brown family and simply begged for something green, it was a perfect meal for a tired American traveler on a very cold night. There was a bed of excellent sauerkraut, upon which there were four types of pork—pork belly, weisswurst, bratwurst, pork loin / ham—and a boiled potato, completed by French bread and butter and hot brown mustard. I couldn’t eat all of it, of course, and was sad that I couldn’t bag up the leftovers and bring them home for The Grill-Meister, whose mother is German, and who would thus never turn down a pork-based Meat Fest.
I really savored my meal and my additional entertainment was people-watching.
It was an altogether pleasant solo trip to a Christmas Market. Paris really never disappoints.
I snapped this photo of the statue called “Le Pouce” outside the hotel as I was awaiting my taxi at 4:20 a.m. the next morning.
Goodbye, Paris, I thought, a little wistfully. I’ll be seeing you.
My friends, if you’re in Paris during the holiday season, the La Defense Christmas Market is a must-do. My description here barely scratched the surface of how wonderful it is, mostly because my fingers were too cold to take any more pictures!
© 2023, Glover Gardens
LOVE the two women in read at the beginning! What characters.