Cajun Night Before Christmas: A South Louisiana Tradition

You can always tell it’s the holiday season in South Louisiana when someone dusts off a copy of Cajun Night Before Christmas, a retelling of the classic tale with a few distinctly bayou-based twists. If you take a swamp tour with us, it’s not hard to tell why this version might sound just a little different than the traditional tale: the Cajun accent of South Louisiana is heavily influenced by “Louisiana French,” a dialect of French that has developed since the arrival of the Acadians in region back in the 1700s. It definitely doesn’t sound strictly French, but it isn’t quite a southern accent either.

Blog, Home Blog, Swamp BlogSarah BarnettDecember 20, 2022christmas, cajun, swamp tour

Christmas Bonfires: A Unique South Louisiana Experience

Families come together between Thanksgiving and Christmas to build large wooden structures, some simple pyramid shapes and some elaborate constructions of local landmarks and more, and on Christmas Eve night, they light these structures stretched all along the levee system, creating quite the spectacle.

Home Blog, BlogSarah BarnettNovember 30, 2022christmas, bonfires, algiers, history

Gators & Ghosts’ NOLA Blog Archive

An uncurated collection of past blog articles.