On the 23rd and 24th, everyone rushes to the supermarket to buy those 3 extra little things they forgot the previous Saturday while doing the big shopping 🛒

Because yes — Christmas happens AT HOME in about 98% of cases 🇫🇷 so people cook a lot.

They plan weeks ahead, slowly buying everything that can be stored, and leaving the fresh products for the very last minute. Preparation is sacred.

🍾 What do they cook?

It starts with “Apéro” — and it lasts at least an hour.

Small toasts with blue cheese & walnuts, smoked salmon, tarama, fish eggs or caviar… all paired with a nice champagne🥂

This is just the warm-up.

🐟 Starters

Usually: smoked salmon, foie gras, oysters, a little salad

You’ll often find smoked duck magret, which is absolutely delicious (this post is making me hungry already 😁)

🍗 Main dish

Then comes the cooked meat: capon, turkey, or magret de canard

Served with pommes dauphines, green beans, and a sauce — pepper sauce or blue-cheese sauce 😋

🍨 Digestive break

At some point, there’s a pause.

Often a scoop of ice cream with a splash of strong alcohol “to help digestion” (science, obviously).

Sometimes there’s even another main dish, usually fish — though some families stop at one main.

🧀 Cheese… and denial

Then arrives the cheese plateau.

You think you’re full.

You’re not.

All your favorite cheeses are there, and your uncle pours you another glass of red wine “to help” 🍷

And if you’re like me, you’ll proudly prove that women can eat and drink a lot.

You never say No to a refill — and people laugh while feeling slightly uncomfortable, because apparently some old rule says “good girls don’t get drunk at Christmas” (who wrote that, seriously?).

🎁 Couch moment

At this point, you collapse on the couch, play with your Christmas gifts, watch TV, and suddenly everything feels way more magical ✨

Funny how that happens after all that wine.

🍰 Dessert marathon

Then come the Bûches de Noël — yule-log cakes and you’ll have one dramatic choice to make:

– the fruity one?

– or the chocolate one?

And for some reasons, you will choose one and because everyone will say the other is so good, you’ll have both,

And you’ll be so ready to die. You’re thinking about all the future workouts you’ll have to do to cope with that and all the previous ones you’re actually ruining in just one day!

And then… ice cream appears 🍦

And somehow, you can still eat it

🍊 Final Stage: FRUITS

A fruit basket enters the room: clementines, or sometimes a fresh fruit salad made by your aunt — bananas, lychees, oranges, apples.

⚠️ Never from a tin. In France, that’s an insult and a life-risking move so be careful mate.

✨ And that’s about it

That’s how you’ve spent an entire day, on the 25th, sitting around a table, from midday until 5 pm, eating, drinking, laughing, digesting… and eating again. And then you may go for a little walk around the “pâtés de maison”.

The night before, on the 24th, you already had a more private celebration, with your closer family circle or with a different part of your family. Then there’s been a real fiery discussion about when the gifts will be opened, on the 24th after dinner or in the morning of the 25th, or if you should bring the gifts to where you celebrate the 25th and wait until you’re there (absolute torture, the mother will want that and the father and children will try to fight it every year).

What about Religion?

Religion has dramatically left the boat in France so only a very little percentage of the population will go to church, whether on the 24th at 7 or 11pm or on the 25th in the morning around 10 or 10.30am. If you’re the only religious person from your family, you will literally end up going to the services on your own and joining your family later on. Or you will give up on the religious aspect of this time of the year.

The French love protesting about established traditions and they collectively have stopped trusting the church, partly because of the repeated scandals around pedophiles and I can’t blame them for that.

But I wish they wouldn’t associate religion and that deep warm faith in your heart that guides you towards your most fulfilling path and timeline. I don’t think anyone has ever reached a really good place in their life without some fierce deep trust in life and what the universe can bring when you fully trust it. Let’s sit with this thought. Live in faith and don’t associate humans’ weaknesses with the depths of the Divine Power because those are two very different things…

Leave a Comment as a Christmas Gift for Me 🙂

With Love & Adventures,

Emi 🙂

Learn French with me in 2026!