Christmas Eve Bonfires Light Up Louisiana Levees

John Roach
for National Geographic News

December 21, 2006

Santa Claus and churchgoers traveling to midnight mass should have no
trouble finding their way along Louisiana's levees this Christmas Eve.

More than a hundred towering bonfires will light the way, as they have every year for at least a century.

The bonfires are mostly 20-foot-tall (6-meter-tall) pyramids made of willow trees and cane reed.

Local families build the structures and simultaneously light them at 7 p.m. sharp, said Rhonda Lee, president of the bonfire festival in St. James Parish, a country near New Orleans, Louisiana (Louisiana photos, maps, profiles, more).

"It really turns out the community and gathers everyone," she said.

The fires burn along the levees in the parishes of St. John the Baptist, St. James, and Ascension.

In addition to gathering family and communities, they've become a popular tourist attraction.

"We have people from all over the world that come see the bonfires," Lee said.

Bonfire History

Marcia Gaudet is an English professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She said the lighting of bonfires on Christmas Eve is a European tradition that the French brought to Louisiana at the end of the 19th century, perhaps earlier.

"The Cajuns didn't have bonfires in Nova Scotia," she said, refering to the French-speaking people who migrated to Louisiana from the eastern seaboard of Canada in the mid- to late-18th century.

(Related: "Cajun Chicken Chases Spice Up Rural Mardi Gras" [February 7, 2005].)

But today the bonfire tradition is well ingrained in all the settlers of southwestern Louisiana and is considered a longstanding fixture in the local culture, Gaudet added.

Lee, the bonfire festival president, said: "If we didn't have the bonfires, we wouldn't know what to do."

Local historian Charlie Duhe said there are two explanations for the tradition's purpose.

"One of the common things that's said [is that] the lighting of the bonfires lights the way for Santa Claus—Papa Noel," he said today on a broadcast of the Pulse of the Planet radio program.

(This news story and Pulse of the Planet receive funding from the National Science Foundation.)

"Another rendition is that it lights the way for people to go to midnight mass for Christmas Eve," Duhe said. "There's always midnight mass along the river, and these fires light the way."

Bonfire festival president Lee said the explanation of a guiding light makes sense.

"We live along the river, and a good fog comes up in the evening," she said.

Nontraditional Fires

Each year St. James Parish issues about 140 permits to build the bonfires, which the state tightly regulates. The parish even has to take out an insurance policy for two million U.S. dollars, Lee said.

While most permits are for the traditional teepee-style bonfires, three permits are given for so-called nontraditional structures.

Structures in the shape of a log cabin, a Southern mansion, a ship, an airplane, and the Louisiana state capitol have all been built and burned.

Lee said the nontraditional structures last year took a cue from Hurricane Katrina, which devastated nearby New Orleans. (Related: Hurricane Katrina complete coverage.)

"We had a helicopter, and the helicopter symbolized the people who were getting rescued off their roofs by the [U.S.] Coast Guard," she said.

While St. James Parish itself was relatively unscathed by the hurricane, the community did lose a firefighter. Another of last year's nontraditional fires was a truck in his honor.

In addition, many of the 2005 bonfires were constructed with logs and other debris left in the hurricane's wake.

"Last year, we burned Katrina away," Lee said.

Duhe, the local historian, said the whole tradition is a sight to behold.

"You can just stand on that levee and see bonfires for miles. It's beautiful."

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