In New Orleans, Christmas is served as a set menu.

01 A dinner that began at one in the morning

The word gives it away: réveillon comes from réveiller, to wake. In Creole New Orleans in the nineteenth century, Christmas dinner was not a dinner but what you ate on returning from midnight Mass, at home, with hunger saved up and the night still ahead. Seafood gumbo, roast meats, dressings, sweets, wine and eggnog; in prosperous houses, daube glacée — a beef stew set cold in its own jelly and sliced onto bread — and grillades with grits. It was repeated on New Year's Eve. The Daily Picayune of 31 December 1897 described the custom as one «which age does not wither».

Age withered it. By about 1920 most of the city's kitchens had adopted the habits of the rest of the country, the French-speaking Creole population was shrinking, and the réveillon retreated into private clubs and the occasional hotel. For half a century it was, at best, a word grandmothers used and grandchildren did not understand.

02 Four to eight courses, and nothing later than 1900

What brought it back was not nostalgia but a cash problem. By the mid-1980s the French Quarter had stopped being where the city did its Christmas shopping, and in December the restaurants emptied. One restaurateur later put it plainly: in December you were lucky to get ten people a night. French Quarter Festivals, the association founded in 1984 to bring residents back to the neighbourhood after the World's Fair, asked local historians for an idea, and the idea was to resurrect the réveillon. At Christmas 1986, fifteen restaurants offered a Creole fixed-price menu for three weeks, at between five and thirty-five dollars. The first to sign up was Ralph Brennan of Mr. B's Bistro, and he admitted the early results were mixed.

They kept going. Around fifty restaurants now take part — forty-eight in 2014, nearly fifty in 2023 — and the rule that turned a stunt into a custom is a menu rule: four to eight courses, at most four choices per course, and every ingredient had to have been available to a Creole family in the 1800s. For years the menu had to be sent to a committee for approval; in 2003 that step was dropped and the list grew. A «contemporary» category was added later for anyone who wanted to deconstruct the gumbo without leaving the programme.

The telling part is the change of setting. The réveillon was a domestic, nocturnal rite; the one you can eat now is a public rite at reasonable hours, in dining rooms with long tablecloths, and a few places still serve it after midnight on the 24th for anyone who wants to keep the original timetable. Grandmother's dinner became a service you book. That is not a loss: it is how this city keeps things. What no longer fits in a house gets moved into a restaurant, and from then on anyone can sit down.

03 A lobby one block long

The building that best explains the character of this Christmas is not a church or a square: it is a hotel reception. The Roosevelt, on Baronne Street, has a lobby that runs the full length of the block, from one street to the next, and since the late 1930s it has decorated it as if it were an avenue. In the first Christmases it was buried in masses of palmetto leaves; then, for decades, in a fluffy white batting that formed a tunnel from door to door and that the city christened the «angel hair» lobby. Today it is birch branches painted white, more than a hundred thousand bulbs, seventy-eight floor-to-ceiling trunks, forty-six trees in a row, four thousand glass ornaments and nearly half a kilometre of garland.

The figure that matters is not the count but the door. The lobby is switched on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in a ceremony where the hotel hands out Champagne to whoever is there, and from that night on anyone can walk in, without buying anything or staying, until New Year's Day. It has become an outing for families who drive in from the suburbs, walk the tunnel of light, take a photograph and leave. A private space works as a public square for five weeks, and nobody in the city finds that odd. It is the réveillon gesture transferred to architecture: the host opens up, the public comes in.

04 The lights hang from oaks

It is worth saying what climate all this happens in. On 25 December the average high is around 17°C and the low around 7°C; snow is an anecdote people date by the year. There are no snowy firs because there are neither firs nor snow: there are live oaks, evergreen, enormous, their horizontal limbs draped in Spanish moss. And the city did with them what it had closest to hand. In City Park, since the late 1980s, Celebration in the Oaks has wrapped those oaks in more than a million bulbs for about five weeks, from Thanksgiving week to New Year's Day, and it is the park's biggest annual fundraiser: close to ten per cent of its budget comes from those tickets. More than a hundred and thirty-five thousand people pass through each season, on foot or by car, along a route that crosses the botanical garden and the children's amusement park.

The visitor with a memory doesn't go for the lights but for a figure. Mr. Bingle is a snowman with an ice-cream cone for a hat, holly wings and a candy cane, invented in 1947 by the display director of the Maison Blanche department store on Canal Street. From 1949 a fifteen-metre version hung from the store's façade every December, and for several generations Christmas began the day it went up. When Maison Blanche closed, in 1998, the giant figure ended up donated to the park, and since 2005 it has been part of Celebration in the Oaks. That move sums up the century: Christmas in New Orleans left the shop windows of Canal Street, which went dark one by one between 1989 and 1998, and settled into a park, a lobby and some fifty dining rooms.

05 A songbook at every gate of the square

There is one night when the host's logic shows without a building in the way. On a Sunday in the week before Christmas, as dusk falls, the four gates of Jackson Square open and at each one volunteers hand out a candle and a songbook. People go in, find a spot wherever they can around the garden and sing carols by candlelight, with no stage worth mentioning and nobody charging anything. It has been organised since 1946, without a break even in 2020 — that year it moved to the grounds of the jazz museum — by Patio Planters of the Vieux Carré, which started as a French Quarter garden club and still is one. The candles and the booklets are paid for by the tour of decorated homes the club runs the same afternoon.

A garden club that calls thousands of people to sing is the neighbourhood version of what the restaurants and the hotel do: someone from the city lays the table, the whole city sits down. The character who presides over all this has a name of his own, and it is Louisiana French: Papa Noël, which is what France's Père Noël came to be called in the colonies. The bonfires the river towns light on the levees on the night of the 24th are said to mark his way, and the hotel trade has borrowed his name too: December rates, when occupancy drops, are advertised as «Papa Noël rates», and in some years close to sixty hotels have offered them. Even the discount here has a host with a name.

06 What stays with you

If you have spent a Christmas in the north, the first thing you notice is what is missing: the cold that forces you indoors, the tree in the living room, the sense that the holiday belongs behind closed doors. Here the temperature lets you stay in the street, and the holiday is spread across dining rooms, lobbies, a park and a square, each with someone at the door telling you to come in. On the 24th you eat a menu a Creole family would have recognised in 1880, served by waiters in a building from 1840; you cross a hotel the way you would cross a bridge; you sing holding a candle a gardener gave you.

What remains is a slightly uncomfortable and rather honest idea. This Christmas was not inherited intact: it was lost, and from 1986 onward it was rebuilt piece by piece, with a list of restaurants, a menu committee, a hotel rate and a snowman rescued from a department store that was closing. And it works anyway, because the city did not rebuild it as a stage set but as the thing it had always done best: table service. New Orleans has no white Christmas. It has Christmas with a tablecloth.