Christmas and New Year in the Alps: a concierge’s calendar

Every year, around May, the first Christmas messages come in. And every year, around 15 December, others arrive along the lines of “we’d like to spend New Year’s Eve in Courchevel, can you find us something?”. I nearly always find something. But it isn’t the same week, and it certainly isn’t the same price.

Here is the real calendar of those two weeks, the one I work to for my clients.

We put them in the same sentence, but they are opposite stays. Christmas week is family-oriented, calmer, almost gentle: children everywhere, chalets smelling of fir, decorated resorts, and dinner served early. It has one flaw worth knowing: the third week of December has the least reliable snow of the season, and in some years everyone skis on a reduced area.

New Year week is the opposite: the most expensive of the winter, the most international, the densest. Tables are full, the clubs run at full tilt, the resort is permanently on show. It’s beautiful, festive, and objectively tiring if you came to ski quietly.

My advice, when I’m given the choice: Christmas with young children, New Year with teenagers or with friends. And if both tempt you, take both weeks, it’s common among my clients, and often cheaper than two separate stays at those dates.

Here is the real hierarchy, as I live it every year. It doesn’t match at all the order in which people worry about things.

• The chalets. The finest properties re-book from one year to the next with the families that already had them. What reaches the market goes six to twelve months ahead, often with seven nights imposed.
• Private instructors. This is the real bottleneck, the one nobody anticipates. Over those two weeks the best are booked from the spring, and no budget conjures up an instructor who doesn’t exist.
• Tables on the 24th and the 31st. They’re locked in from October, sometimes earlier, and the great houses run fixed-date set menus with no flexibility.
• Transfers on the 23rd, the 26th and 2 January. These are the tightest days of the winter on valley roads and helicopter slots.
• The private chef. Many families decide late to dine at the chalet on the 24th or the 31st, at exactly the moment when every available chef has been taken.

The 24th is a short, highly ritualised day in a resort. The lifts close early, the resort gets ready, and everything happens between five and ten in the evening.

In late afternoon most resorts hold a torchlit descent by the instructors, often followed by entertainment and an appearance by Father Christmas for the children. It’s simple, slightly old-fashioned, and every year it’s the moment families photograph most. So I place dinner after it, never during.

For dinner itself I almost always push for the chalet over a restaurant, and I stand by that bias. A private chef, a laid table, children heading up to bed when they tire, presents put out without last-minute logistics: it’s lovelier, it’s simpler, and it avoids a car journey on an evening when the whole resort is moving at once. The great tables on the 24th are superb, but they serve a single set menu at a fixed hour, and with young children that’s a gamble.

New Year’s Eve in a resort follows a fairly unchanging pattern: a long dinner, fireworks let off from the resort shortly after midnight, then the clubs taking over until the small hours. My job is mostly to make those three moments line up, which is less obvious than it sounds when dinner runs to five courses.

• Book the table for 8 or 8:30pm, no later. A New Year’s Eve menu runs three hours, and nobody wants to discover the fireworks from inside a dining room.
• Ask in advance where the fireworks are visible from. Some chalet terraces have the best view in the resort, and that’s often the evening’s best plan.
• Lock in the club table straight after dinner, not at midnight. By then everything has long been taken.
• Arrange a driver for the whole night, both ways. It’s the night of the year when finding a car at three in the morning is hardest.
• If you have young children, arrange childcare at the chalet when you book dinner, not the day before.

I’d lose some credibility not to say it: the second and third weeks of January are by far the most pleasant of the winter. The snow is generally better than at Christmas, the pistes are empty, tables can be booked the day before, instructors are available, and the same chalet costs a fraction of the New Year rate.

If your dates aren’t dictated by a school calendar, that’s the period I’ll recommend, and I do so every year knowing perfectly well that I’m selling a cheaper week. It’s simply the right answer.