Festivals · Tue 03 Nov 2026
Christmas and New Year in India: the complete guide
December is India's high season, and it opens with Hornbill in Nagaland before it ever reaches Christmas: ten days at Kisama, then Goa's midnight masses and star lanterns, Park Street's festival in Kolkata, and the Margazhi concerts in Chennai.
India's December does not build to Christmas. It starts with a festival in the Naga hills, runs Christmas through a Catholic state on the Arabian Sea and a boulevard in Kolkata, and hands the south to a month of Carnatic concerts. The complete season, in the order it happens.
December is the fullest month on this calendar, and Christmas is only part of the reason. The season opens in Nagaland, peaks in Goa, puts a festival down the middle of Kolkata's most famous street, and runs a parallel high season of classical concerts in Chennai that has nothing to do with Christmas at all. This guide takes the month in order, with the listings that carry each part of it.
First, Hornbill: 1 to 10 December
The month opens at Kisama, in the hills below Kohima, where the Hornbill Festival runs from Tuesday 1 to Thursday 10 December at the Naga Heritage Village. It is Nagaland's showcase of itself: the sixteen major tribes in their own morungs around the central arena, with dances, wrestling, chilli and rice beer, rock concerts in the evenings and the state's biggest gathering of the year. Our Hornbill guide covers the ten days in full, and the Inner Line Permit guide covers the paperwork: Indian citizens need the ILP and foreign visitors need to register, and Kohima's rooms go early. If December gives you one trip, this is the one to build around, and everything else in this guide is what the rest of the month does while you are coming back from the hills.
Goa: India's Christmas heartland
Goa is where Christmas in India is a season rather than a day. The state's churches fill through December, star lanterns go up over the lanes of Fontainhas, Panaji's Latin Quarter, carol singers work the villages, and the centre of it is midnight mass on Christmas Eve, at the Se Cathedral and the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa and in parish churches across the state, followed by Christmas lunches that run all afternoon. The month builds to it in stages. The Feast of St Francis Xavier at the Basilica of Bom Jesus falls on Thursday 3 December (marked expected on this calendar; the feast is fixed, the programme is the basilica's to confirm). Then the Serendipity Arts Festival takes over Panaji from 13 to 20 December, eight days of exhibitions, performance and food across the city's venues, listed in full at the festival's event page. Christmas week itself is the state's busiest of the year: book the room before you book anything else.
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Kolkata: Christmas on Park Street
Kolkata claims the country's other great Christmas, and it claims it on one street. The Kolkata Christmas Festival runs along Park Street and Allen Park from 18 to 30 December (marked expected on this calendar), with the lights the street is famous for, food stalls, carol singing and the Anglo-Indian bakeries of the old quarter doing their biggest trade of the year. Christmas Day itself, when the festival and the street are at their fullest, also gets a concert: Candlelight's Christmas Classics at Science City on Friday 25 December. Kolkata's claim is different from Goa's: less church, more street, and a city that treats the festival as its own winter carnival.
The concerts, and the other December
The season's formal music splits two ways. Mumbai gets the carols in concert dress: Candlelight's Christmas Classics in the Afghan Church in Colaba on Friday 11 December, the NCPA's It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas on Sunday 20 December, and the same Candlelight programme in the Royal Opera House on Christmas Day itself, 25 December. Delhi gets the markets, led by the Boho Bazaar Christmas Market at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on 19 and 20 December. And Chennai runs the December that ignores Christmas entirely: the Margazhi season, hundreds of Carnatic concerts sabha by sabha from mid December into January, in 2026 centred on the Music Academy's 100th season. It is December's other great reason to travel, and our Margazhi guide takes it hall by hall.
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New Year's Eve
The year ends where the season has been loudest. Goa's beach belt runs its biggest night of the year on 31 December, and the ticketed anchor on this calendar is Anjunadeep Open Air at Thalassa, Ashvem, the melodic house label's open air party running over the night of Thursday 31 December into the new year. Mumbai, which took the Sunburn Festival this year on 18 and 19 December, does its New Year in hotels and clubs rather than on one beach. Wherever you land, the rule of the Indian December applies twice over on the 31st: the room is the plan, and it should have been booked weeks ago.
Where to stay, and planning notes
For Goa, Panaji puts Fontainhas, the Mandovi and the Serendipity venues at your feet and the Old Goa churches a short drive east, while the north coast belt from Baga to Ashvem is the base for the party end of the season. For Hornbill, Kohima is the base and Dimapur the rail and air gateway. December is peak pricing across all of it, the Christmas to New Year week most of all, and domestic flights into Goa and Dimapur sell out around the holidays.
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Plan the month as a chain, not a clash: Hornbill in the first ten days, Goa or Kolkata for Christmas week, and the December calendar for everything in between, from the ISL fixtures to the Sunburn Arena nights in Bengaluru.
More reading on the articles page, or go straight to the events calendar.