What I’ve Learned Living in Paris as a Brit — and Why Emily in Paris Gets It Wrong

On a cold New Year’s Eve morning, Colette (famously portrayed in film by Keira Knightly) stood at her window at 9 rue de Beaujolais, looking out over the bare trees of the Palais-Royal gardens. From that apartment she wrote Rêverie de Nouvel An, a meditation on winter, time, and renewal. She takes a stroll with her two dogs, and meditates on the cold, childhood memories, and fleeting moments. It is a work born of stillness: the city slowed, the year pausing before it turns. I think of this work often at this time of year, especially as I brave wind and rain to walk my (much larger, much more boisterous) dog in these very gardens.

As the year draws to a close I find myself roaming Paris with a similar attentiveness. I am tying up loose ends and lingering deliberately in these last days of 2025, which has possibly been my best year in Paris. I came here to research a book about trailblazing French women, and with that very nearly complete, I want to make the most of Winter in Paris, which is fast becoming my favourite season.

Winter in Paris has always been iconic, conjuring images of garrets and great art, candlelit revelry and creative communion — La Bohème (without the tuberculosis). The romance remains; the central heating, thankfully, has been upgraded. But at first glance, Paris is not Europe’s most Christmassy city, although this year it is trying hard to keep up with the trends by rolling out mini Christmas markets here, there, and everywhere. Emily in Paris suggests perpetual sparkle — couture fittings broken up by champagne and scandal, women gliding barelegged through the streets in ringarde novelty berets. The reality is more grounded: apartments are smaller, fashion is understated, and absolutely no one is without tights, unless they really do want to end up like Mimì.

The fantasy does exist, of course – it just usually involves a lot of queuing. Crowds jostle for celebrity hot chocolate at Carette or Café de Flore, the Marais throngs with style seekers and aspiring influencers, candlelit carol concerts ring out in historic churches, and extravagant window displays line the Champs-Élysées.

One notably celestial experience for me this month was crossing the Pont Alexandre III under a full moon, the Seine glossy and black below, on my way to midnight ice skating at the ethereal Grand Palais. Each December, the vast glass nave of this iconic building is transformed into the Grand Palais des Glaces, and the effect is genuinely mesmerising.

Built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, the building was designed dazzle, its sweeping ironwork and monumental glass roof a testament to French architecture and artistry. In 2025, transformed into the ‘Palace of Ice’, it does not disappoint. Beneath the soaring canopy, Europe’s largest indoor rink stretches out, light pouring in through panes of glass that seem to rise endlessly upward. It leaves Somerset House and the Rockefeller Center – my other two favourite festive ice rinks – very much in the shade.

By night the rink becomes a disco: lights swirl reflecting off giant disco balls, basslines thud against the iron arches, and an icy Eiffel Tower takes centre stage. Parisians careen around with wildly varying degrees of competence. Champagne and hot dogs are dispensed from igloo-esque kiosks. It is exuberant, faintly ridiculous, and completely irresistible — the sort of excess Parisians usually pretend not to enjoy, while clearly enjoying it very much. The highlight for me is the unexpected spectacle of my Parisian boyfriend — usually elegant, composed, and faintly snooty — floundering on his skates. As the native in this famously impenetrable city, he is usually the one guiding me, two steps ahead, translating not just language but everything else too. Here, however, he is Bambi-legged, clutching my hand with surprising urgency as I take the lead for once.

I moved here in a particularly frosty January, and that first winter was difficult. My relationship at the time was quietly imploding, and I hadn’t yet been in the city long enough to have built the friendships that make a place feel navigable. One of the rarely accurate observations in Emily in Paris is that the city can be unforgiving when you are new — especially in winter.

But the city steadily warmed up. Friendships arrived, formed over shared dinners, borrowed scarves, and Hinge dates. None of my friends work in advertising or perform at the Crazy Horse, but my first flat here was shared with a singer from La Femme, my second with a talented film director who makes suitably artistic films that meditate on grief and the human condition – which does feel appropriately French.

Alongside my friends, my time in Paris was guided by the voices of the women I was writing about. Researching the lives of twenty-one French women — many of them immigrants themselves — has shaped how I move through the city. Paris feels layered, thick with other women’s lives and impressions, their footsteps echoing alongside my own.

In the wintery gardens of the Palais-Royal or passing the Moulin Rouge I think of Colette (an actress as well as a writer) outraging audiences with a queer kiss on that very stage. Passing Rue de Cambon I think of Coco Chanel and her Nazi lover, holed up in the Ritz during the French occupation. Passing the Folies Bergère, I think of Josephine Baker who traded her banana skirts for military uniform and became a hero of the French Resistance. Climbing the hill of Montmartre to the white domes of the Sacré-Cœur, I think of Louise Michel, mother of Anarchy. The hill is crowded even on cold December nights, lovers fixing padlocks and kissing over the city, but if you pause long enough, the noise falls away and the past presses close. Paris has a singular talent for holding many memories in the same space.

As Winter descends Parisians retreat indoors, the city grows quieter. My mornings slip past in baroque libraries, chasing footnotes beneath painted ceilings. Afternoons are spent writing in cafés, my hands clasping steaming cups of chocolat chaud so thick it hardly moves in the mug. Evenings fall into the city’s winter rhythms —vin chaud, late dinners, and flames dancing in Haussmannian grates.

On December mornings, as I walk my rescue dog around Lac Daumesnil, a thin film of ice sometimes skimming the surface, the city feels un-performative, elemental, and solitary. Winter, I’ve learned, is Paris’s most philosophical season – especially when the snow falls. Yes, there is revelry, consumerism, light, and spectacle — but there is also intimacy, silence, time to pause, and time to write.

Katherine Pangonis is an award-winning author and historian, specialising in Renaissance and medieval history. She was born and raised in London, and has been living in Paris, France for the last two years, where she wrote A History of France in 21 Women, which is out now.