In 1877, writer Lafcadio Hearn stood on the deck of the Natchez, keeping his balance as the Mississippi gently rocked the steamboat. He looked back at New Orleans, having ventured out, as he explained, “to watch the spectacle of the levee in holiday times.” Like an artist planning a painting, he chose the best vantage point to view the city and began to capture its details:
“Christmas Eve came in with a blaze of orange glory in the west, and masses of lemon-colored clouds piled up above the sunset. The whole city was filled with orange-colored light, just before the sun went down; and between the lemon-hued clouds and the blue were faint tints of green. The colors of that sunset seemed a fairy mockery of the colors of the fruit booths throughout the city; where the golden fruit lay piled up in luxuriant heaps, and where the awnings of white canvas had been replaced by long archways of interwoven orange branches with the fruit still glowing upon them. Walking under these Christmas booths seemed like walking through a natural bower of heavily freighted fruit trees. It was an Orange Christmas.”
A Christmas tree decorated with New Orleans style ornaments (Photo by Anders Pedersen)
His Christmas was not white sprinkled heavily with candy canes and ruddy Santas. New Orleans rarely provides the expected and conventional, even with regards to traditional holidays. The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer visited the city in the early 1850s and complained that the holiday was unrecognizable here. She recalled the snow-covered forests and little candle-lit cottages of her home and wrote, “In New Orleans, Christmas is no Christmas.”
She was correct that New Orleans Christmas traditions were different from those observed in Northern Europe and the rest of the United States. The older French families celebrated Christmas as a religious festival by attending Midnight Mass and church again the next morning. Between services and before catching a few hours of sleep, bleary-eyed families would refresh themselves with the “Reveillon” meal, breaking the fast of Christmas Eve. Most presents were exchanged a week later, on New Year’s Day. Outside the city, by at least the second half of the nineteenth century, the banks of the Mississippi were lit each Christmas Eve with bonfires. Local custom now holds that they were meant to light the way for Papa Noël, the Cajun Santa Claus.
Little by little, New Orleans adopted the more common traditions of Christmas, and there is certainly an abundance of candy canes and Santas now ornamenting the city. What the climate could not provide, hotels such as the Roosevelt have accomplished with an indoor, man-made, winter wonderland. A local department store, Maison Blanche, even introduced a snowman, Mr. Bingle, as its Christmas mascot. But the older traditions have reappeared as well. Reveillon meals are available at any number of restaurants throughout the entire month of December and can be eaten during normal dinner hours rather than after Midnight Mass, though the church service still draws many families every year. This Christmas Eve, the Mississippi will reflect the glow of the bonfires between Baton Rouge and New Orleans with more Christmas-tree shaped pyres than were ever built in any year of the nineteenth century. Like the holiday lights winding up the palm trees of Canal Street, New Orleans has come to balance the subtropical richness of Hearn’s orange Christmas with the cozy traditions Bremer found lacking.
Quotations from Occidental Gleanings, volume 1, by Lafcadio Hearn and The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, volume 2, by Fredrika Bremer, translated by Mary Howitt.
Nicole Biguenet Pedersen, a native New Orleanian, studied history at Brandeis University and went on to obtain a law degree at the University of Chicago. Her current research projects focus on historical perceptions of New Orleans. She is a special contributing writer to GoNOLA.
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