Christmas in France, Christmas in America: Same Holiday, Different Traditions

Every December, two very different Christmas stories unfold side by side.

One is soft-focus: excitement in the streets, fairy lights, decorated shop windows, the insufferable idiotic Netflix Christmas movies, and that faint belief that, for a few days, life might feel lighter. The other is harsher: traffic jams around shopping centres, parcels stuck in over-stretched logistics networks, Black Friday banners that never seem to come down, and nervous glances at year-end sales targets.

In both the United States and France, Christmas is a mighty economic engine. But what it powers, and how people live it, differs remarkably. What we decorate, how we eat, when the “season” begins, all reveal something about our cultures – and about the uneasy link between love, status and money.

The Christmas season is one that I cannot help get excited about and yet it feels hollow to me. I often feel trapped by Christmas traditions and lore. An anthropologist once wrote that discovering culture is about “making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.”  That’s what I try to do with Christmas: step back and ask, why are we doing this? What is this collective seasonal effervescence really about? Or maybe, as some would say, I’m just an “Ebenezer Scrooge” at heart.

Two countries, two calendars

In the United States, Christmas doesn’t stand alone. It is the centrepiece of a long “holiday season” that runs from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. The Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving morning is like the starter pistol: the day after comes Black Friday, then a wave of promotions that can last for weeks. For many retailers, it’s a make or break period. The last six or seven weeks of the year will decide whether the year was a success or a failure.

Christmas in the shops starts almost as soon as the Halloween pumpkins are cleared away. Decorations go up in early November; some homes are covered in lights  by mid-month.

France follows a different clock. There is no national Thanksgiving to launch the season, and no single parade that marks the kick off. Decorations and Christmas markets appear gradually in late November and early December; Advent calendars begin to count down the days. But the real centre of gravity remains 24–25 December. In the French town where I live, Lyon the 8^th of December “The Festival of Lights” is our Xmas marker so to speak.

On the 24th, many people still work a full or half day before heading off to family. The real “big night” is le Réveillon, the long dinner on Christmas Eve. Lunch on the 25th is another major gastronomic reckoning, and for many families the eating doesn’t really stop until late afternoon. Although the 26th is not officially a holiday in France, much of the country slows down or shuts altogether.

Over the last decade, though, the calendars have become more similar in one respect. Black Friday – originally a strictly American event – is  firmly established in France and across Europe. Retailers have rushed to import not just the discounts, but the drama: countdowns, “exceptional” promotions that somehow manage to last for two or three weeks. A season that used to feel relatively short and intense is slowly being stretched.

Lights vs lace tablecloths

Walk through an American suburb in December and you’ll see how Christmas spills into public space. Roofs and fences glow with LEDs; reindeer and snowmen appear on lawns. Shopping malls become stage sets, with giant trees, fake snow and Santa’s grotto.

In France, outdoor decoration is more restrained. Town centres and department stores put on a show, but the typical French home does not become a Christmas theme park. The true obsession lies indoors, and more specifically on the table.

If the United States tends to over-decorate, France tends to over indulge at the table .

Americans invest energy and money in what hangs from the eaves and sits under the tree. The French pour their care into what will arrive on the plates and in their glasses: Champagne, oysters and other seafood on Christmas Eve, and Christmas lunch with foie gras, smoked salmon, roast chapon, elaborate desserts, and cheese boards that look like small mountain chains.

The spending habits reflect this difference. In the US, a large share of the Christmas budget goes into gifts, decorations, and experiences linked to shopping – from Santa photos to festive, unimaginable signature Xmas coffees at Starbucks. In France, while gifts are still important, a significant part of the budget disappears into ingredients: better wine and higher-quality produce. Christmas is less about “more things” and more about “seasonal food delicacies”.

How long does Christmas last at the table?

The contrast becomes even clearer once people sit down to eat.

On an average day, the French already spend more time eating and drinking than Americans, and Christmas amplifies this gap.

In the US, the typical Christmas meal often lasts about as long as a hearty Sunday lunch. There may be turkey or Virginia ham, mashed potatoes, candied yams, pies, and – for some –  the traditional Christmas eggnog. Increasingly, families replace the traditional midday meal with a substantial Christmas breakfast or brunch, then give the rest of the day over to games, television, snacking, or more presents. The emotional climax is usually the opening of gifts, not the hours at the table.

In France, the Christmas table is almost a stage, and the meal a kind of culinary theatre. A lunch can easily last, between and four hours. It unfolds in acts: apéritif, seafood, foie gras, roasted bird, salad and cheese, dessert (bûche de Noël), coffee, digestifs. Between courses, there are toasts, arguments, reconciliations, jokes, and the reappearance of old family stories that only surface once a year.

There is a saying in Lyon that goes: “Au travail, on fait ce qu’on peut; à table, on se force.” Roughly: at work we do what we can; at the table we don’t mess around. The message is that meals are not just about eating; they are about showing care, hospitality, even identity.

Seen this way, time itself becomes a kind of currency. Americans invest more in the run-up – in shopping, in decorations, in office events – and move faster through the meal. The French invest in the meal as an event that justifies the tenderness of the preparation and the expense.

“Crise de foie”: the French illness that isn’t

If you stay in France through the holidays, one expression pops up again and again: crise de foie. Literally, “upset liver”. It describes the misery after too much rich food and drink.

Doctors will tell you that a true liver crisis is not what’s happening. It’s usually a mix of indigestion, migraine, and hangover. In English, you would simply complain of “indigestion”. The idea that your liver is staging a revolt is specifically French.

But the expression tells an interesting cultural story. The main problem, in the French imagination, is not spending too much; it is eating too much. Pharmacies still sell liver cures and plant-based detox remedies marketed almost explicitly for the post-Christmas period.

In the US, the language of excess tends to focus elsewhere: “food comas” after Christmas, New Year’s resolutions about weight loss, anxiety about maxed-out credit cards. The culturally visible hangover is financial and physical.

Is Christmas a beautiful racket?

Beneath the lights and the menus, a question keeps surfacing: has Christmas become a beautiful, well-organised racket and we are the chumps?

In the US and UK, opinion pieces regularly describe the winter holidays as the most powerful engine of consumerism of the year. Advertising, social media and peer pressure combine to turn generosity into a kind of performance test: if you suggest fewer gifts, are you failing your children, your partner, your friends?

The numbers in the US are huge. Total holiday sales run into the hundreds of billions, and many families admit going into debt to fund it all. A celebration that was supposed to be about gratitude, faith, or community ends up fueling bank overdrafts.

In France, the vocabulary is different, but the unease is similar. Surveys of the budget de Noël show people trying to rein in spending, cutting back on gifts for adults, or turning to online bargains. The media oscillate between luxurious menus for Réveillon and survival guides for “doing Christmas properly” on a limited budget. The pressure to bien faire Noël – to get Christmas “right” – can be particularly harsh in a cost-of-living crisis.

And behind all this, a quieter moral contradiction never really goes away.

There have always been the poor, the homeless, the grieving, refugees in war-torn countries, sitting uneasily alongside the bright, commercial Christmas we know today. My mother once told me that, as a small child, she suddenly stopped believing in Father Christmas. She realised she could not understand why poor children received such different treatment from him. Either Santa was unjust, or he didn’t exist. For a child, that is a brutally clear moral calculation.

We rarely ask that question as adults. Instead, we donate a little, tell ourselves we have “done our bit”, and carry on. But the uncomfortable link between love and spending never completely disappears.

Pagan roots, Christian wrapping

This tension is not new. Long before Christianity placed the birth of Jesus Christ on 25 December, the winter period in Europe was already a time of festivals, with gifts, feasting and rituals to push back the dark. When Christianity spread, it borrowed many of these traditions, reinterpreting and reframing them rather than wiping them out. Christmas today is a hybrid: 5% religious, 15% seasonal, 80% commercial.

What this looks like at work

All of this might sound abstract, but it shows up in everyday office life, especially in international teams.

An American colleague might roll their eyes at the commercial madness and still feel unable to escape it. There are school shows, office Secret Santa, “ugly sweater” days and online carts full of “deals” that expire at midnight.

A French colleague may feel less pulled into Black Friday hysteria, but more deeply invested in planning that one long evening where everything has to be “comme if faut” or perfect on the table. They may joke about the inevitable crise de foie to come, but the anxiety is real: will the wine be up to par, the bûche good enough?

These different pressures create different sensitivities. American teams may be comfortable with playful consumer rituals: novelty jumpers with the company logo, gift exchanges, office decorations. French employees may prefer a good year-end lunch and then going home early.

For managers, the safest approach is to recognize that in both cultures, Christmas mixes genuine affection with very real economic and emotional pressure. Not everyone celebrates. Not everyone can afford to participate at the same level.

Rethinking the season

If there is an intercultural opportunity in all this, it might be here: to use the end of the year not only to spend, but to talk. To compare how long we actually sit at the table. To ask why the French still speak of crise de foie, and why so many Americans dread their January bank statements. To notice how easily love gets measured in receipts, and to experiment with other ways of showing it.

We could choose, in small ways, to resist the racket: give fewer but more thoughtful gifts; buy second-hand; replace one round of presents with a shared experience; redirect some of the budget towards people who will otherwise have no celebration at all.

We could remember that Christmas was never just one thing. It was a pagan festival of light, a Christian feast of birth and hope, and now an economic marathon. Perhaps the most thought-provoking question is not whether we should “keep” Christmas, but which Christmas we want to keep – the one in the shop window, the one on the table, or the one that asks hard questions about who is invited in, and who is left out.