New Orleans month by month — at a glance
Hover each month for the summary. Click to pin it.
In almost every city of the northern hemisphere, Christmas has a recognisable end: a day in January when the lights come down, the markets close and the street returns to its normal colour. In New Orleans that day does not exist. On the night of 6 January, while elsewhere the tree is being dismantled, a streetcar on the St. Charles line rolls out of the barn here with a brass band inside and forty costumed people who call themselves the heralds of Carnival. The next morning the bakeries change their windows. The city has not ended a festival: it has switched festivals without turning off the light.
01 Six Weeks with Both Ends Fixed
New Orleans's season has something odd for a city so little given to punctuality: both its ends are fixed by the calendar, not by commerce. It starts on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the night City Park switches on Celebration in the Oaks, more than a million lights over centuries-old live oaks along a roughly three-kilometre route that has been running since the late 1980s. And it ends on 6 January, Epiphany, which nobody here calls that: it is Twelfth Night, and it is the first day of Carnival.
Between those two ends, the month is ordered by weeks. All through December some fifty restaurants serve Réveillon menus, a multi-course dinner that revives a nineteenth-century Creole custom. On the Sunday before Christmas, as evening falls, Jackson Square opens its gates for a mass carol sing with candles and songbooks handed out at the entrance, a date a French Quarter residents' association has kept since 1946. On the night of the 24th bonfires are lit on the Mississippi levees upriver, in St. James Parish. On the 31st the city sees in the New Year on the riverfront. And on the 6th it switches festivals.
What sets this calendar apart from others is not its density but its shape. It is not a peak followed by a drop, as in Christmas-market cities; it is a six-week plateau that joins another plateau. To understand New Orleans you have to be at the junction.
Key moments at a glance
Réveillon all month, carols in the square, bonfires on the 24th. An average low of 9 °C and the river already breathing fog in the morning.
The park lights stay on for the first few days; on the night of the 6th the streetcar rolls and Carnival begins. The only week with both festivals.
Mild autumn and a quiet city, but the calendar does not start until the night after Thanksgiving.
The other festival in full swing. If the junction is what you want, you are late: only one of the two is left.
02 A Nine-Degree Low and a Single Night of Frost
The 1991–2020 climate normals for New Orleans airport give December an average low of 9.1 °C and an average high of 18.2 °C. But the figure that explains how the month is lived is a different one: the lowest temperature a typical December reaches is 0.3 °C, and the highest, 26.8 °C. In other words, one ordinary December holds a night that brushes frost and an afternoon in shirtsleeves. Local records remember Christmases at 28 °C, in 1903 and again in 2015, and the month's all-time low, from 1989, is twelve below zero. The season is not lived with one coat but with two wardrobes.
A second trait shapes the whole calendar: the lack of sun. December gathers about 158 hours of sunshine, 50 % of the possible total, and January drops to 47 %; they are the two greyest months of the year in a city that passes 60 % in October. The sun sets shortly after five in the afternoon, and at the solstice the day lasts ten and a quarter hours. That is why everything that matters in this season happens after dark, and within a narrow band of hours: the park lights open at six, the Jackson Square gates at half past, the 6 January streetcar leaves at seven. New Orleans does not resist December's darkness; it schedules it.
The difference from a European Christmas-market city lies in the temperature at which that scheduled night takes place. At seven in the evening of an ordinary December day the thermometer sits around twelve or thirteen degrees, and the month's average relative humidity is 77 %. It is not glove cold; it is a damp chill that slips in at the collar. Nobody shelters in a hut with mulled wine because there is no need: people walk, sing in an open square, dine in a room with its doors open to the courtyard.
03 The River Cools Before the Air: Fog Season
December opens another season in New Orleans that does not appear in the guidebooks: fog season. Local meteorologists place its peak between December and March, and the mechanism is easy to watch from the levee. The Mississippi comes down cold from the north of the continent, far colder than the Gulf air arriving from the south on a light, moisture-laden wind; when that mild air crosses the cold water, it condenses. The port pilots, who suffer it most, count an average of 155 fog days a year on the city's stretch of river.
The effect on the city is physical and visible. There are December mornings when, from the French Quarter riverfront, you cannot see the far bank six hundred metres away, and a freighter's horn sounds without the freighter appearing. When visibility collapses entirely, the Coast Guard closes the river to traffic at the Algiers Point bend, right in front of the Quarter, and ships wait at anchor. A city that lives off its port stops for a few hours because of the water that made it rich.
For anyone coming for the season, fog is the part of winter nobody advertises and the one most remembered. The cathedral with its spire cut off halfway up, steam over the corner café, balcony lights still on at eight in the morning because the street is still grey. In July the river is a sheet of heat; in December it is an atmosphere factory. It is the same city with different air, literally.
In December the Mississippi runs cold and the Gulf air arrives mild. Where they meet, the city vanishes for a few hours each morning.
04 A Whole Month of Table, Not a Single Night
The Réveillon deserves an article of its own, and at FlowTravel it has one. Here it matters only for what it does to the calendar. The original custom was a family supper in the small hours, after Christmas Eve Mass or on the last night of the year, and it had faded from the city's kitchens by the 1920s. When in 1986 a French Quarter cultural association persuaded fifteen restaurants to revive it, it did so with a decision that changed its nature: instead of one night, three weeks of December on a set menu. Today it is some fifty restaurants and the whole month.
That detail is the key to the season. In other cities the Christmas table is a two-date event, the 24th and the 25th, which a visitor can rarely share. In New Orleans the table has been stretched to fill thirty days, so that any midweek December evening you can sit down to the public version of a dinner that used to be private. The city has turned its domestic rite into a calendar. And it did so, it should be said, because December was a slow month for the hotels and needed filling. The tradition was revived to give shape to time.
05 The Night of 6 January: the Streetcar and the First King Cake
The Phunny Phorty Phellows have existed since 1878, stopped riding for decades and returned in 1981 with an idea that seemed minor at the time: to announce Carnival on the very night it begins. They gather around half past six at the Willow Street streetcar barn, near Carrollton, in costume and with instruments; at seven they board a St. Charles line streetcar dressed for the occasion and ride the whole line, to Canal Street and back. On the way they share a king cake, and whoever finds the baby in their slice is crowned on the spot. It is Carnival's first public appearance on the street, and it happens at the hour the rest of the country is boxing up its decorations.
They are not alone that night. Since 2008 a walking parade has crossed the French Quarter in honour of Joan of Arc, whose birthday falls on the same day; it began with some fifty people and now gathers around eight hundred and fifty in medieval dress with live music. And a ball society, the Twelfth Night Revelers, has held its private party that night since 1870. Three different acts, from three different eras, that coincide on one date because the date is what matters.
The most visible consequence of 6 January is not in the street but in the bakeries. King cake, a brioche-style ring finished with coloured sugar, is traditionally sold from that date until Fat Tuesday and then disappears until the following year. So the length of the second festival is decided by Easter: in 2027 Fat Tuesday falls on 9 February and the king cake season will last about five weeks; in 2028 it falls on 29 February and will last nearly eight. What never changes is the start. On the morning of 7 January, windows that held trees the day before hold cakes, and that overnight switch is the most exact image of how time works in this city.
06 What This Season Charges You
The first bill comes from the sky. In December rain arrives with cold fronts crossing the continent, not with afternoon storms: when it comes, it is a whole grey, fine-drizzle day, and behind the front the temperature drops at once. The two most anticipated nights, the carols and the streetcar, are held outdoors and are not rescheduled. If the front coincides, you get wet.
The second comes from the fog, which is not only beautiful. It delays early flights, pins cruise ships to the wharf and turns a drive out to the levees into an exercise in patience. The bonfires of the 24th are an hour upriver, viewed from the levee road, and in the busiest stretches traffic is cut off: you have to arrive before dark and expect to return late. It is not a half-afternoon outing.
And the third comes from the calendar itself. The City Park lights close on precisely the two nights most people would want to see them, the 24th and the 31st, a pattern repeated season after season. Several restaurants pull the Réveillon menu on those same nights. The city celebrates to a fixed calendar and expects you to have read it before coming.
07 When to Go, and What Another Week Costs You
If you can choose only one week, choose the one that contains 6 January. Arriving on the 2nd or 3rd you still have the park lights, the last Réveillon menus that some restaurants extend, river fog at its best and, on the night of the 6th, the one spectacle that exists in no other city: watching one festival become another without a pause. On the morning of the 7th you buy the first king cake. No other week of the year shows you both faces.
If you prefer Christmas proper, the second half of December gives you the table, the Sunday carols and the bonfires of the 24th, and charges in return the high prices of those dates and the closures of the 24th and the 31st. The first half is the quieter option: the city already has the season on and does not yet have anybody in it. And February, when most people come, shows only the second festival, with no trace of the first.
Some cities are understood during their biggest festival. New Orleans is understood at the junction between two, at seven in the evening on 6 January, when a streetcar hung with purple tinsel pulls out of the barn and nobody on the street thinks anything has ended.
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Nan Palmero San Antonio's Christmas is lit on a Friday and understood two weeks later
Thayne Tuason Leavenworth switched off the countdown and Christmas stayed lit until February
Claude Truong-Ngoc