Go up the Mississippi from New Orleans on Christmas Eve — into St. James Parish, sugarcane country, the towns of Gramercy and Lutcher and Paulina — and just after dark the levee catches fire. Not by accident. For weeks, families and friends and whole crews of coworkers have been stacking logs into great cone-shaped pyramids, twenty and thirty feet tall, spaced down the top of the earthen levee for miles. And at dusk, all at once, they light them. A hundred bonfires and more go up together, a wall of flame running along the river as far as you can see, the sky gone orange over black water, crowds gathered between the blazes with bowls of hot gumbo while the occasional firework cracks overhead.
This is how South Louisiana announces Christmas: by setting the night on fire. And down in the city, in a different and quieter way, it does something just as telling — it stays awake to eat. The word for that is Réveillon, and it means awakening. Up the river and down, this is a place that refuses to sleep through the most important night of the year.
To light the way for Papa Noël
Ask anyone on that levee why the fires burn, and you'll get the answer every child there already knows: to light the way for Papa Noël.
He's the Cajun Santa Claus, and in the local telling he doesn't come by reindeer — he comes up the bayou in a pirogue pulled by alligators, a gator named Gaston out front. The bonfires are his runway lights, blazing so he can't possibly miss the houses along the river. It's a wonderful story, and it's the one the parish tells. The truer history is a little mistier and just as good: these are feux de joie, "fires of joy," a European custom of Christmas-season bonfires that French and German settlers carried to the river — documented along this stretch since at least the 1880s, lit in the old days to light the way to Midnight Mass as much as to light it for Santa. Historians still gently argue the exact origin. The parish doesn't especially care. The fires go up, Papa Noël comes, the children believe, and the believing is the point.
The word means "awakening"
Thirty miles downriver, in the French Quarter, the older tradition is about the table — and it begins, properly, in the middle of the night.
In the Creole New Orleans of the 1800s, devout French-Catholic families fasted all of Christmas Eve to ready themselves for Communion at Midnight Mass. Picture them squirming in the pews of St. Louis Cathedral, then bursting out into Jackson Square in the small hours, hungry and elated, and hurrying home through the cold streets in their holiday best to a feast that had been waiting all day. That feast was the Réveillon — from réveil, "to wake" — and it earned the name twice over: it woke you after the fast, and it kept you awake into the strangest, latest, most magical hours of the year. Some ran to a dozen courses. Then, like a lot of beautiful and inconvenient things, it faded — gone by the 1940s as plain American Christmas mornings won out — until the city revived it in the 1990s, this time as multi-course Réveillon dinners served at restaurants through December. The hour is more civilized now. The spirit survived intact.
The Creole table
What graced a Réveillon table was Creole cooking at its most lavish, and it still is.
Oysters, raw and roasted. A dark, deep gumbo — duck and andouille, or seafood — built on a long-cooked roux and the holy trinity of onion, celery, and bell pepper. Turtle soup, daube glacé, grillades and grits, all the old French-Creole showpieces. And to end it, the single most theatrical thing in the New Orleans repertoire: café brûlot, a flaming coffee made tableside from dark roast, brandy and cognac, orange and lemon peel studded with cloves, cinnamon, and sugar — set alight and ladled in a long ribbon of blue fire before it's poured. It is, fittingly, one more fire lit to keep the night going. The sweets lean French — a bûche de Noël, the chocolate yule log — and somewhere in the wings a king cake is already waiting, because in this city Christmas doesn't end the season. It hands off to Carnival.
Until it's light
So the night burns at both ends of the river. Up in the parishes the bonfires sink slowly to embers while families linger between them in the heat. Down in the city the feast runs long past midnight, plates and stories and one more cup of something flaming, until the smallest kids finally crash and the oldest relatives are still going.
That's how America gathers on Christmas Eve in South Louisiana: by lighting the dark on purpose and refusing to go to bed. Réveillon — the awakening — turns out to name the whole night, not just the meal: a river lined with fire to guide a man and his alligators home, a table that waits up till dawn, a place that decided the holiest night of the year was far too good to sleep through. The rest of the country wakes up on Christmas. Louisiana stays awake to meet it.
