Christmas in Louisiana

The bonfires

It happens in St. James Parish, an hour’s drive up the Mississippi from New Orleans, in Lutcher, Gramercy and Paulina. For weeks, families and groups of neighbors build structures of willow and sugarcane on the levee. Most are pyramids 20 to 25 feet tall, but some are shaped like paddle-wheel steamboats, houses or airplanes. They line the levee for miles.

On the evening of December 24, around 7 p.m., they’re lit at more or less the same time. There can be a hundred of them, or more in a good year. It’s free, it’s outdoors, and it lasts as long as the wood burns. Then everyone heads home for the réveillon, the late Christmas Eve meal.

Ask anyone there and you’ll hear the same answer: the fires light the way for Papa Noël so he can find the houses in the river fog. It’s a lovely story, and one the region has been telling for a long time.

Three hundred years?

You’ll often read that the tradition goes back three centuries to the first French settlers, and that it comes from old midsummer or solstice bonfires. The written records don’t go back that far.

Here’s what local sources do show. French Marist priests, who came to teach at Jefferson College after the Civil War, are said to have brought the bonfire custom to the area. The first recorded bonfire, at Mount Airy, dates from 1884 and was lit by a man named George Bourgeois. And here’s a clue from what’s missing: in 1894, the Louisiana folklorist Alcée Fortier described the customs of this same stretch of river and never mentioned Christmas bonfires.

The popular version also leaves out another change: until the 1950s, these were mostly New Year’s fires, lit on the batture, the strip of land between the levee and the river. Moving them to Christmas Eve, and up onto the levee, is fairly recent.

None of this takes anything away from it. A hundred and forty years of bonfires is a real tradition. It’s just not as old as people say, which happens with a lot of traditions.

The nativity in the bonfire

There’s no Louisiana style of nativity the way there’s a Provençal or Neapolitan one: no workshops, no local figures, no market. Churches set up their nativities like everywhere else in North America, with store-bought figures.

But there’s one exception, where the nativity and the bonfire come together. Since 1990 in Lutcher, the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul has built a nativity-shaped bonfire on the levee every year. The idea came from Leonard J. Bivonia, who had seen one in 1988. The figures are placed inside the structure, people come to see them in the days leading up to Christmas Eve, and they’re taken out before the fire is lit.

It may sum up this whole page: a nativity scene you build to take apart, inside a bonfire you build to burn.

The réveillon, lost and rebuilt

The Creole réveillon was real, and it was much like the French one: families came home from Midnight Mass and shared a late meal. New Orleans’ Daily Picayune described one as late as 1897. Then, sometime between the 1920s and the 1940s, it faded away, along with the French language and the Creole city life that kept it going.

What New Orleans calls a “réveillon dinner” today isn’t that tradition. It’s a revival, started in 1986 by the group that runs the French Quarter festivals, with a handful of restaurants offering fixed-price menus under the “Creole Christmas” name. It caught on, and it’s now a December fixture in the city.

That’s not a criticism. It’s simply something brought back rather than something that never stopped, and the same is true of many Provençal traditions too.

Papa Noël and his alligators

“Papa Noël” really does come from Louisiana: it’s what Santa Claus is called in Louisiana French, and people still use the name today, even those who no longer speak French.

The alligators, though, have a clear starting point. They come from Cajun Night Before Christmas, published by Pelican in the early 1970s and illustrated by James Rice. In it, Papa Noël arrives in a pirogue (a small canoe) pulled by eight alligators, one of them named Gaston (a registered trademark). They’re simply the eight reindeer from the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which the book retells Cajun-style.

So the name is old, and the alligators came from a book. Today you can’t have one without the other in Louisiana, and both show up in Christmas decorations, on cards and even in some church nativity scenes.

Going there

The fires are lit on the evening of December 24, on the levee between Lutcher, Gramercy and Paulina, in St. James Parish. It’s free. The road along the levee is closed to cars that night, so plan to park far away and walk, and wear shoes that can handle mud.

It’s rarely cold, but it’s damp, and the smoke from the cane and willow hangs in the air for a long time. It’s over fairly early in the evening, when families head home for the réveillon.