The Paris correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_ writes:--"Although New Year's Day is the great French festival, the fashion of celebrating Christmas something after the English custom is gaining ground in Paris every year. Thus a good deal of mistletoe now makes its appearance on the boulevards and in the shop windows, and it is evident that the famous Druidical plant, which is shipped in such large quantities every year to England from Normandy and Brittany, is fast becoming popular among Parisians. Another custom, that of decorating Christmas trees in the English and German style, has become quite an annual solemnity here since the influx of Alsatians and Lorrainers, while it is considered _chic_, in many quarters, to eat approximate plum-pudding on the 25th of December. Unfortunately, the Parisian 'blom budding,' unless prepared by British hands, is generally a concoction of culinary atrocities, tasting, let us say, like saveloy soup and ginger-bread porridge. In a few instances the 'Angleesh blom budding' has been served at French tables in a soup tureen; and guests have been known to direct fearful and furtive glances towards it, just as an Englishman might regard with mingled feelings of surprise and suspicion a fricassee of frogs. But independently of foreign innovations, Parisians have their own way of celebrating Noel. To-night (Christmas Eve) for instance, there will be midnight masses in the principal churches, when appropriate canticles and Adam's popular 'Noel' will be sung. In many private houses the _boudin_ will also be eaten after the midnight mass, the rich baptising it in champagne, and the _petit bourgeois_, who has not a wine cellar, in a cheap concoction of bottled stuff with a Bordeaux label but a strong Paris flavour. The feast of Noel is, however, more archaically, and at the same time more earnestly, celebrated in provincial France. In the south the head of the family kindles the yule-log, or _buche-de-Noel_, which is supposed to continue burning until the arrival of spring. Paterfamilias also lights the _calen_, or Christmas lamp, which represents the Star of Bethlehem, and then all repair to the midnight mass in those picturesque groups which painters have delighted to commit to canvas. The inevitable _baraques_, or booths, which are allowed to remain on the great boulevards from Christmas Eve until the Feast of the Kings, on January 6, have made their appearance. They extend from the Place de la Madeleine to the Place de la Republique, and are also visible on some of the other boulevards of the metropolis. Their glittering contents are the same as usual, and, despite their want of novelty, crowds of people lounged along the boulevards this afternoon and inspected them with as much curiosity as if they formed part of a Russian fair which had been temporarily transported from Nijni Novgorod to Paris. What was more attractive, however, was the show of holly, mistletoe, fir-trees,