NOV-DEC_flipbook

the Holiday issue

ancestors. Often described as “meals fit for a trip to heaven,” only the finest foods the family could muster would suffice. While their European brethren broke their fasts on escargots, foie gras, and turkey stuffed with chestnuts, the south Louisiana celebrant would have enjoyed a regionally adapted menu. Both the country Cajuns and the city Creoles might have started their meal with oyster stew or turtle soup, but while the city folks’ entrées were likely cold beef daubé glace, or smothered medallions of pork or veal, their country counterparts would have enjoyed a variety of fragrant roast game they hunted themselves. Both groups would have enjoyed rich puddings and custards, copious amounts of wine, brandy, and cordials, and candied fruits and fanciful desserts like blucher de Noël or croquembouche. Christmas Day gift giving was modest among Louisiana’s Catholics. Children’s stockings were hung on Christmas Eve and they may have found a trinket and small sweets. Adults did not exchange gifts on Christmas Day. “At that time, Christmas was a very religious experience,” said the late Florence Hardy, Louisiana State Archivist, in a 2004 interview with The Times-Picayune . “ On Christmas Day, you visited la creche — the manger scene. Gifts were exchanged on New Year’s Day.” In a December 2004 article for The Daily Advertiser of Lafayette Jim Bradshaw wrote “Santa didn’t begin to visit Cajun children until the late 1800s. Before then, le petit bonhomme Janvier , sometimes called “the Little January Stranger” in English, delivered gifts at New Year’s. If the children were good during the year, he left them fruit and perhaps a bauble or two. But if they had been bad, he turned trickster and left them ashes.” William Webb says his mom Lola Fontenot Webb delightedly recalled piles of oranges and apples on her family’s Grand Prairie porch on New Year’s Day. “Her people were sharecroppers, their resources lean but New Year’s Day was special.” Prior to the turn of the 20th century—most assuredly before the Louisiana purchase — throughout Catholic Louisiana New Year’s Day was spent visiting neighbors to sup and

Holiday History by Jyl Benson

N o matter the depths of their devotion, as the Mass that began at midnight on Christmas Eve dragged on, Louisiana’s 19th century French Catholics would have squirmed on the hard wooden pews in anticipation of the words that would set them free: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” The Creoles in New Orleans and the Acadians in the swamps and prairies would have burst through the church doors and into the chill air in the wee hours on Christmas morning. That this devout,

drama-loving bunch had been fasting since the previous Midnight to ready themselves to receive Holy Communion at Midnight Mass would have put a bit of zippity do-da in their steps as they rushed home in their Sunday best to lavish holiday feasts upon which they would sup. The sharing of an opulent meal, the Reveillon, following the holiday mass on Christmas Eve and again on New Year’s Eve (the feast day of the French Saint Sylvestre) was a custom inherited by Louisiana Catholics from their European

54

MY ROUSES EVERYDAY NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2016