Christmas in Fair Park in Paris

Christmas in Fair Park is the fairgrounds version of a holiday shopping tradition: vendors spread through four buildings on the Paris and Lamar County Fairgrounds, selling decorations, handmade crafts, and gifts while kids' entertainment runs alongside and Santa sets up for photos. It runs Friday evening and Saturday morning into early afternoon, which makes it a natural bookend to the same weekend's Christmas Parade of Lights on the square a few minutes away.

A weekend of holiday shopping in Paris

If you build a Paris holiday weekend around these two dates, it stacks up nicely: the fairgrounds market on Friday evening, the parade downtown on Saturday night, and the town square lit up from the tree lighting the weekend before. The fairgrounds keeps its own pace, wide open barns full of booths and the smell of fair food, a different energy from the storefront square, and both are within a few minutes of each other in the same town.

The drive from the property

The fairgrounds sit just off the main roads in Paris, about 30 minutes up US-271 from County Road 1070. For anyone weighing the property as a weekend retreat, an evening at a market like this doubles as a way to test the commute and stock up on handmade Christmas gifts at the same time, with the whole downtown square a short drive past the fairgrounds entrance.