In Paris, you just have to look up at the Champs-Élysées to get a curious early preview of the holidays. On this September 22, 2026, with Christmas still more than three months away, decorative string lights are already installed in the trees along the famous avenue.
No, the 2026 Christmas lights won’t kick off in September. It’s actually a multi-week engineering project, launched well in advance so that everything is ready for the lighting display scheduled for mid‑November.
The sheer scale of the task is the main factor. INSTYLUM, the team specializing in festive lighting installations, has just announced their return to the Champs-Élysées for a ninth consecutive year. The company also confirmed in recent days the start of the first installations along the avenue, noting several weeks of high-altitude work, hanging, and securing.
Stringing up a few garlands around a tree may seem quick enough. But on the scale of the Champs-Élysées, we’re talking about a project of a completely different magnitude. In the last edition, 400 trees were lit along the entire avenue. The setup designed by Blachere Illumination featured, notably, 52 kilometers of garlands.
The schedule observed this year, by the way, is nothing out of the ordinary. Since 2019, the decoration work had begun in early September, with the lighting planned for around November 20. It took nearly two months to outfit all the trees.
It depends on the setup chosen each year, but the experience from earlier editions provides a clear sense of the logistics involved.
To prepare the 2025 illuminations, INSTYLUM technicians worked six days a week starting September 2, deploying up to 20 people, eight aerial lifts and four trucks. The project also involved laying several kilometers of fiber optic cable and hundreds of control boxes essential to operating the lights.
These devices are no longer just for turning lights on and off. The latest installation along the Champs-Élysées lets you program colors, twinkles and a variety of lighting sequences. Blachere Illumination describes it as a system built for genuine stagecraft, with trees capable of acting as 'pixels' in a coordinated show.
Once the garlands are in place, there’s still work to do: install the electrical and digital systems, complete the connections, test the equipment, and map out the various scenarios. This is also why kicking off the project in September helps leave a cushion for adverse weather or any unforeseen technical issues.
We will have to wait several more weeks before the garlands currently in place actually start to sparkle. The Champs-Élysées illuminations typically run from mid-to-late November 2026 through the beginning of January 2027. The lights visible in the trees in September will therefore remain off for several more weeks.
This page may contain AI-assisted elements, more information here.
