I understand that it is still only recommended 6… mais mon français n’est pas terrible
I might have misunderstood it:
Noël épargné, déplacement autorisé le 24 décembre
. Nous autoriserons donc les déplacements pour cette soirée du 24 décembre ", ajoute le Premier ministre. La règle des 6 adultes à table (sans compter les enfants) reste néanmoins recommandée.
Difference between meaning of règles (which many french people break) and interdiction (which they generally don’t).
Oh I do agree, the most inventive comedian of his generation. And I do love his comedic rants, only trouble is I find that often they coincide with my real ones. 
more ideas are coming out… about how to spend christmas safely
Lock the door, close the shutters and pretend you’re not in 
Same as last year then😺
Like you, Tim, all my family here are French and it’s very split; half of us wanted to abandon the usual gathering (of well over 20 around the table), others are saying that most people are ignoring the calls for 6 adults max and want to go ahead. We’re going to boycott and have a quiet day at home just the 4 of us with perhaps just calling in for coffee. We’re working the 24th and 26th so pleased to have a quiet day anyway!
Biggest problem is for the 31st - there are soooo many illegal parties planned, most youngsters just refusing not to party. I think we’re going to see a big third wave mid-january 
Everything’s changed since I typed that reply, now reads:
Family have now decided, MIL just been on the phone organising everyone: “c’est pas interdit donc merde, on fait comme d’hab !” … 18 around the table 
but we’ve insisted that we skip the apéro and that the other 12, who normally comme later for pudding and coffee, don’t as 30 might be pushing it this year 
I’m opting out of all these discussions… seems crazy to me that folk can be xxxxxx … but we are all different…
I am the same, cannot understand with all the people dead that people can be so flippant about this.
Covid is not going to take a day off and I don’t think it is at all a laughing matter that people don’t seem to care about their loved ones enough to put their lives at risk just for the sake of a meal.
I know a lot of people will have to do a lot of soul searching when the 3rd wave hits in January and members of their family are in ICU or dead because folks did not take this seriously.
It’ll be a day where I’ll see only a tenth of the people I see 6 days a week (400 a day through my tabac and I see half of them). Same goes for the kids compared to the school canteen and hours everyday stuck in their classrooms. Stay safe and joyeux Noël 
For those of us that have children here the decision to have a family Christmas or not is so difficult, we are aware of the health risks and will limit them as much as possible but not to such an extent it ruins the day.
most people will start with good intentions, then as the alcohol flows so will the good intentions be forgotten
Looks like we now have 2 threads for the same topic!
There isn’t a one size fits all because the specific situation (and risk) of each person is different; there’s a huge difference between pensioners with existing medical conditions living in rural France who see almost nobody and younger people who are working, meet many people (a couple of hundred in my case) every day and their children who spend all day in classrooms with their classmates, then cramed into the canteen every lunchtime. In short, in our case and the rest of our family of our generation, we will see and come into contact with just a handfull of people on Christmas day compared to every other day of the week. Horses for courses
Ah yes, Andrew, but you see all those people through a plastic screen and all masked up, if your tabac is anything like ours. I doubt there will be much masking at your Christmas table.
There will be masks, distancing too, we’re lucky as we can get well over 30 round the table and the dinning room is huge so distancing won’t be a problem. It may sound flippant but it isn’t, we’re taking things seriously, many have already had covid in the family too, but we need to protect MIL and FIL
And eating, and drinking? 
We have both forcibly and voluntarily banned ourselves from eating in company anywhere since January, everything from the mobile chippy before the bar closed was take away. Why take the risk?
But as I said before, we don’t have family pressures to contend with. 
Yeah but like Andrew said, those of us who have to go out into the big wide world on a daily basis can’t voluntarily ‘ban’ ourselves from a whole load of potentially risky situations. We just have to get on with it.
So we are making our decisions based on a whole different set of criteria.
And as it happens, there will be around six of us from three different households for Christmas but were there to be more (kids / partners / parents) that wanted to be here, they would be.
As other people have said, the official advice issued has been in the form of suggestions and guidelines, so lets not all err towards being a tad sanctimonious about it please…
No moral superiority from me, I have already admitted that the lack of family pressure makes our decisions easy, but I also fail to see that just because people are forced by circumstance of earning a living to take risks in ‘the big wide world’ should take more risks at home than they need to.