Merry Christmas in French: Joyeux Noël

Merry Christmas in French is Joyeux Noël !, said "zhwah-YUH noh-EL", and it is right in Paris, Brussels, Geneva and Montreal alike. Joyeux means "joyful" and Noël means "Christmas", from the Latin for "day of birth". For the whole season there is Joyeuses fêtes !, "happy holidays": it is the first wish Québec’s language office suggests for a card, where it is often written Joyeuses Fêtes! with a capital, while France usually writes fêtes in lower case. Below are Christmas wishes in French ready to copy, for tu and for vous; then the greeting word by word with its two dots, whether it is le or la Noël, how France and Québec differ, the words of the season, three carols, and how often French film and television subtitles say these words.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 18 min read

Christmas wishes in French, ready to copy

French has two ways of saying "you": tu to one person you know well, and vous to anyone you would address formally and to any group at all, family included. So je te souhaite is "I wish you" to your sister, and je vous souhaite is "I wish you" to your boss, your clients or your whole family at once. Choosing between them is covered in formal and informal you.

The wishes in the tables are written the way France prints them, with a narrow space before !. Québec leaves the space out (Joyeux Noël!): more on that below.

For family and close friends

For colleagues, clients and anyone you call vous

Two pieces of grammar in those lines:

• De, not des. Je vous souhaite de joyeuses fêtes and passez de bonnes fêtes use de where you might expect des, "some". When an adjective comes before a plural noun, des is reduced to de in writing and careful speech: de bons amis, de joyeuses fêtes.
• Passe and passez are the imperative of passer, "to spend (time)": passe to someone you call tu, passez to someone you call vous or to several people.

Religious wishes

For the whole season

Fête in the singular is a festival, a party or a saint’s day, and in Québec and Switzerland it is also your birthday, so Bonne fête! there is what you say on a birthday. The plural, les fêtes, is the holiday season. Use the plural for Christmas and nobody will be confused.

Joyeux Noël, word by word

• Joyeux is "joyful, merry", from joie, "joy". The dictionaries trace it to about 1050, and its feminine Joyeuse was the name of Charlemagne’s sword in the Chanson de Roland, around 1100. In wishes it means simply "happy": joyeux anniversaire is "happy birthday". The feminine is joyeuse, and before the feminine plural fêtes it becomes joyeuses.
• Noël comes from Latin natalis, "of birth", in the phrase natalis dies, "day of birth", which the Church used for the birth of Christ. It is first recorded in French early in the twelfth century. Old French also had nael, and the TLFi explains the change: the o of Noël comes from dissimilation, French avoiding the two a sounds of natalis in a row. Italian Natale and Old Provençal nadal kept them.

Joyeux Noël is therefore "joyful day of birth". In the Middle Ages Noël! was also simply a cry of joy, shouted by a crowd to greet a king or good news, and a French proverb still keeps the old word in its weather: Noël au balcon, Pâques au tison, "Christmas on the balcony, Easter by the fire", a mild Christmas means a cold Easter.

Saying it: zhwah-YUH noh-EL (IPA [ʒwa.jø nɔ.ɛl]).

• Joy- is zhwah, with the zh of "measure", and -eux is the rounded vowel of bleu: purse your lips and say "uh".
• The x of joyeux is silent. It would be heard as a z before a vowel, but Noël starts with a consonant, so there is no linking sound.
• Noël has two syllables, no-ël, with the weight on the second.

The two dots. The mark on Noël is a tréma, and it says that the ë is a vowel of its own rather than part of oe: no-ël, not "nwell". The TLFi records that the Académie française wrote Noel, without it, in the first edition of its dictionary in 1694, went back and forth in 1718 and 1740, and has written Noël in every edition since 1762. Without the dots the word is still understood, and subtitlers type plain noel in 5.5% of cases. In a card, write the dots: on a French keyboard type the ¨ dead key (Shift and ^) and then e; on Windows with a US keyboard, Alt+0235.

Le Noël, la Noël, or just Noël?

Larousse and the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) set out the same three uses:

• Noël, with no article, is the commonest, the OQLF notes. Il a neigé à Noël, "it snowed at Christmas"; passer Noël en famille, "to spend Christmas with family".
• Le Noël is masculine. Un joyeux Noël, un beau Noël, nos plus beaux Noëls: this is why the wish is joyeux, not joyeuse.
• La Noël is also correct. It is feminine because something has been left out, la (fête de) Noël, "the (feast of) Christmas". It is used only with la, alone, and often in phrases about the time of year: à la Noël, "at Christmas", vous partez pour la Noël ?, "are you going away for Christmas?". The TLFi first records it in 1813.

Capital letters. The festival always has a capital, Noël, in the singular and the plural. With a small letter, un noël is a Christmas carol, and familiarly son petit noël is someone’s Christmas present (the OQLF and the TLFi write that one in lower case, Larousse with a capital). The adjective in a wish takes a capital only at the start: Joyeux Noël!, but je vous souhaite un joyeux Noël.

The authorities do not agree on everything:

The TLFi, the large French dictionary, has it both ways: its heading is Père Noël, and its quotations from George Sand and Sartre write père Noël. Either spelling is defensible; pick one and keep to it.

Merry Christmas in Québec French

Québec says Joyeux Noël too. What it adds is a name for the season:

• Le temps des fêtes, or temps des Fêtes, is the holiday season from Christmas to New Year. The OQLF notes that it has been current in Québec for more than a century and is rare in France. It was once criticised as a translation of English "Christmas time", and the OQLF rejects that: temps here is the ordinary French "season", as in le temps des cerises, "cherry time".
• Les fêtes, alone, is older still in Québec, recorded from the early eighteenth century. In France les fêtes is short for les fêtes de fin d’année, "the end-of-year holidays"; in Québec it is understood as short for le temps des fêtes.
• Joyeuses Fêtes! comes first in the OQLF’s list of wishes for a card, written either with or without the capital F. The OQLF gives its example sentences both ways: passer le temps des fêtes au chalet or le temps des Fêtes.
• No space before ! and ? The OQLF prefers no space before the exclamation mark, the question mark and the semicolon, and allows a narrow space where software can produce one. French typography in France puts a narrow non-breaking space there. So the same card reads Joyeux Noël ! in Lyon and Joyeux Noël! in Quebec City.

The OQLF also advises against two calques of English, compliments de la saison (compliments of the season) and souhaits de la saison (season’s greetings), and notes that they are hardly used now anyway.

France and Québec side by side

The Québec column comes mostly from the French Wikipedia’s article on Christmas in Québec, which is thin on sources, and from the OQLF’s own examples: l’Après-Noël and its sales, le magasinage du temps des fêtes (Christmas shopping). Treat it as a sketch of a whole province, not a rule for every family. The Fée des étoiles is the one detail the sources argue about: some trace her to the Scandinavian St Lucy, and the ethnologist Yvan Fortier doubts that link and dates her to twentieth-century advertising.

Belgium shares France’s words and has its own calendar: there St Nicholas comes on the night of 5 to 6 December, leaving presents and sweets in children’s shoes, accompanied by the père Fouettard.

The words of the Christmas season

Five of these have a story worth knowing:

• The Strasbourg market. The Christkindelsmärik, the "Christ Child’s market" in Alsatian, has been held in Strasbourg since 1570 and was long the only Christmas market in France. It began as a St Nicholas market; on 4 December 1570, after a Protestant pastor preached against presents from a saint, the city council abolished St Nicholas’s Day and let the stallholders trade before Christmas instead. It now runs from the first Saturday of Advent to the evening of 24 December.
• The réveillon comes from réveiller, "to wake", and was first a small meal taken at night in company. A dictionary of 1750 already describes it as an entertainment held "after the Midnight Mass". There are two of them, on 24 and 31 December; the second belongs to the New Year page.
• The thirteen desserts are younger than they look. Provençal Christmas Eve has had fruit, fresh and dried, and the pompe à l’huile (an olive-oil bread) on the table since at least 1683, but nobody counted them until 1925, when the Aubagne writer Joseph Fallen wrote "il en faut treize", "there must be thirteen". Frédéric Mistral had put out eleven at his museum in Arles. By 1946 thirteen was settled.
• The santons are a product of the Revolution: when churches were closed and the midnight mass suppressed, small clay "little saints", the people of a Provençal village with their trades, were made so that every family could have a crib at home. The first santon fair opened in Marseille in 1803 and is still held every year. The craft of the santonniers was added to France’s inventory of intangible cultural heritage in 2021.
• St Nicholas has been the patron saint of Lorraine since the Battle of Nancy in 1477, and until about the 1960s he mattered more than Christmas to children there; in some Lorraine families the presents still come on 6 December. In the Nord and in Belgium, the père Fouettard is said to be the wicked butcher of the legend, condemned by the saint to follow him.

Three French Christmas carols

Il est né, le divin Enfant. "He is born, the divine Child" is the French carol everyone knows. Its words appear from 1818 and its tune was printed in 1862 as an "old hunting call": in 1886 the musicologist Julien Tiersot found it in hunting-horn manuals as La Tête bizarde, among calls from the time of Louis XV. The refrain is in the public domain; this is the text of a Swiss songbook of 1917:

Versions vary in the second line: many print résonnez, musettes, and the French Wiktionary records the line as sonnez hautbois, résonnez musettes.

Minuit, chrétiens. The poem is by Placide Cappeau, a wine merchant from Roquemaure in the Gard, written around 1843, and Adolphe Adam set it to music in 1847; it was first sung at the midnight mass in Roquemaure on 24 December 1847. It reached Québec in 1858, the same year John Sullivan Dwight made the English version, "O Holy Night". Both words and music are in the public domain. The opening, as printed in a Swiss school songbook of 1867:

Versions differ in the third line: the French Wikipedia prints la faute originelle, "the original sin", where this one has la tache.

Petit Papa Noël. The best-selling single ever in France, according to the French Wikipedia, was sung by Tino Rossi in 1946, with words by Raymond Vincy and music by Henri Martinet. It is a child’s song to Father Christmas, and it is still in copyright, so we will not quote it. An earlier version with the same tune, sung in Marseille in 1944, was a child’s prayer for a father held as a prisoner of war; Vincy rewrote the words without the war.

How often do French films say them?

We counted the words of the season in French film and television subtitles, about 318 million words of dialogue.

Each figure is how many times the word is said per million words. These are single words, so every count includes whatever else the word means, which is what the last column is for: crèche is a day nursery as well as a crib, and Noël is a first name as well as a festival.

What the counts show:

• Noël is said 117.2 times per million words, the same figure as on the nine-language Christmas page, because both count noël and noel the same way. Of the words in the table, only cadeau, "present", is said more often, and only just; but every birthday present is in that count too.
• Noël beats les fêtes on screen. Noël is said 6.4 times as often as fêtes, though fêtes also counts every party: on screen, people talk about Christmas far more than about the holidays.
• Joyeux is everyday, joyeuses is rare. Joyeux is said 23.4 times as often as joyeuses, and counts every joyeux anniversaire as well as every Joyeux Noël. Joyeuses, which every Joyeuses fêtes needs, turns up only 668 times in all those words of dialogue, so the season wish cannot be said more often than that.
• The turkey is said more than the tree, dinde ahead of sapin, though some of the turkeys are an insult.
• Noël is said 30.1 times as often as réveillon, and Avent and santons hardly at all. These are words of the French calendar, and much of the collection is translated from English-language films, which have no réveillon to translate.

That last caution covers the whole table. The French subtitle collection mixes films made in French with translations of American and British ones, and it does not say which subtitles came from France and which from Québec, so it cannot settle any of the differences above.

Learn the language behind the greeting

Joyeux Noël teaches two rules of French in two words: an adjective agrees with its noun, and an x that is silent here is heard before a vowel. Verbavia teaches French from the most common words up, a lesson a day, free on the web.

New Year has its own page, with Bonne année, meilleurs vœux and the second réveillon: Happy New Year in French. The same Christmas greeting in eight other languages is in Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages, and the card wishes for other languages are in Merry Christmas in Spanish, in German, in Italian and in Chinese. For the colours of the season, rouge and vert, see colours in French.

Merry Christmas has its own page in Portuguese too.

Sources

• Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales (CNRTL), Trésor de la langue française informatisé (TLFi): noël (etymology from natalis, first attestations, nael and the dissimilation, the tréma and the Académie’s spellings of 1694 and 1762, the feminine from 1813, the medieval cry, Noël au balcon, Pâques au tison, père Noël in Sand and Sartre), joyeux (about 1050; Joiuse, Charlemagne’s sword; Joyeux Noël! Joyeuses fêtes!), réveillon (from réveiller; 1531; "après la Messe de minuit", 1750), santon (from Provençal santoun), fouettard (capital for the traditional figure) and avent (from Latin adventus).
• Larousse, Dictionnaire de français: Noël (from natalis dies; gender, la Noël, capital letters, le Père Noël), noël (the carol), joyeux (in wishes), fête (birthday in Québec and Switzerland; les Fêtes with a capital), Avent, réveillon, santon, étrennes, crèche, bûche, sapin, guirlande and dinde.
• Office québécois de la langue française, Banque de dépannage linguistique: Majuscule au nom fêtes (temps des fêtes, its history, France and Québec, the card wishes, the calques to avoid), Majuscule aux noms de fêtes religieuses, civiles ou nationales (Noël: capital, gender, la Noël, no article; l’avent; l’Après-Noël), Majuscule aux noms de personnages (père Noël, père Fouettard), Des devant un adjectif antéposé and Espacement avant et après les signes de ponctuation.
• Wikipédia (French): Espace fine insécable (the space before ! in France, none in Québec and Switzerland), Noël au Québec (the Fée des étoiles and Yvan Fortier, the lutins, the evening mass, the food), Christkindelsmärik (1570, the council’s decision of 4 December, the dates), Treize desserts (Marchetti 1683, Fallen 1925, Mistral’s eleven, 1946), Santon de Provence (the Revolution, the 2021 inventory), Bûche de Noël, Saint-Nicolas (fête)) (north and east of France, Lorraine and 1477, Belgium), Compagnons de saint Nicolas (the père Fouettard in the Nord and Belgium), Messe de minuit, Il est né le divin enfant (1818, 1862, Tiersot), Minuit, chrétiens (Cappeau, Adam, Roquemaure 1847, Québec 1858, Dwight) and Petit Papa Noël (chanson)) (Rossi, Vincy, Martinet, 1944 and 1946, best-selling single).
• Wikisource: Minuit chrétiens, from Kurz, Répertoire musical pour les écoles, volume 3 (1867), and Il est né le divin enfant, from Rossat, Chansons populaires recueillies dans la Suisse romande (1917).
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The counts are computed by scripts/frequency_noel.py in Verbavia’s repository and printed from its output rather than typed.