Learning to Holiday

"The Cajun Night Before Christmas" by Trosclair

If I do the math, I guess I've been celebrating Christmas now longer than I didn't, though I'm still not really comfortable with it. I was raised a Jehovah's Witness and didn't leave the church until I was 26 but those are the years when you learn how to do these things, or at least that's what I've been lead to believe by the Holiday Industrial Complex.

No, relax. I'm not going to rant about any of that.

But that's what much of the holiday entertainment suggests, right? That you learn how to celebrate holidays as a kid and then you pass that along to your own children, for good or ill. So what about those of us who came to it late?

To be clear, it's not like I was unaware of Christmas until I left the Witnesses and was then bombarded with all these traditions. I went to elementary school at a time when the Christian holidays (none of which I celebrated) were observed in the classroom as part of the unofficial curriculum, and those of us who didn't celebrate were just kind of left in a corner by ourselves while Valentines were exchanged or King Cake was sliced or Christmas carols were sung. In fact, that's where I first saw the poem/book I'm going to talk about later, "The Cajun Night Before Christmas," along with the poem it's based on, in my second grade homeroom/reading class.

My parents had prepared me for all this. I had practiced, at the start of the school year, a little speech I was to give to my teachers about how because of my faith, I didn't say the pledge of allegiance and I didn't take part in any holiday celebrations and so on. And because I was a mostly obedient 7 year old, when it came time for those things in class, I sat in my desk and read a book and comforted myself with the knowledge that my classmates just didn't know that Jesus couldn't have been born on December 25 and that Santa wasn't real and so really I was better off because I knew the truth about it all.

But I learned the stories of course, because how couldn't I? They're everywhere, both the Jesus in the manger bits and the Santa delivering gifts bit and the reindeer and all the music, especially the music. From Thanksgiving onward, nothing but Christmas music. (Yes, I am old enough to remember when Christmas season didn't start until after Thanksgiving, which I also didn't celebrate). I love to sing and so I would scour the lyrics of the songs that I heard for those songs that were more seasonal than holiday. Jingle Bells was fine. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was not. I remember once trying to convince myself that Adeste Fidelis was okay because I didn't know what the words meant but then the teacher gave us the English translation and that was done.

Even if I wasn't participating in the holiday festivities at school, I was aware of them. I wasn't hiding in the corner with my hands over my ears crying "worldly worldly worldly or anything." Of course I wasn't. And it was kind of impossible to miss on tv as well, since this was pre-cable and every broadcast channel had Christmas specials and very special episodes and there was just no getting away from it.

The effect was that my sense of what Christmas was supposed to be like was informed completely by pop culture. But there was one thing I had in common with all my Christmas-celebrating classmates. The pop culture version of Christmas that they got was pretty alien to them as well, because there is no snow in Louisiana, certainly not as far south as we lived, and snow is a huge part of Christmas.

Snow and snow gear and generally being cold is a huge part of most Christmas stories. Fireplaces crackling and chestnuts roasting and sleigh bells ringing and Santa in a massive coat—that was not our experience. I mean, we knew snow existed, and if we'd traveled north-north (not like Memphis or Hot Springs, further) we might have felt and seen it, but it might as well have been the surface of the moon as far as we knew. It snowed one time in Slidell in the 11 years I lived there and I was in Florida when it happened. The first time I really experienced snow was my first year in grad school in Fayetteville and let me tell you, I was not ready for the little bit we had on the ground.

So we really had to make our imaginations work when we heard the songs or stories about St. Nicholas and the reindeer. And it's not a surprise that someone would write a version for the snowless among us.

The poem/book "The Cajun Night Before Christmas" was published in 1973 but it got its start "as a Christmas message from Bergeron Plymouth Company of New Orleans" a few years earlier. The pseudonymous writer Trosclair won a Clio award for it in 1967. I didn't know any of this when I was sitting in my second grade class. I didn't know about the Clio award until just now, honestly. And I didn't know much about Cajuns either, since I'd just moved to Louisiana earlier that year. But I knew I liked this story a whole lot more from the moment she started to read it to us.

Twas the night before Christmas an' all t'ru de house,
Dey don't a ting pass, not even a mouse.
The chirren been nezzle good snug on de flo',
An' Mama pass de pepper t'ru de crack on de do'.

De Mama in de fireplace done roas' up the ham,
Sit up de gumbo an' make de bake yam.
Den out on the by-you dey got such a clatter
Make soun' like old Boudreau done fall off his ladder.

Allow me a little diversion about the voice here. When I first moved away and people asked me where I was from and I said Louisiana, they were often surprised because they said I didn't have an accent. To be clear, I absolutely have an accent. It's faded some since I've lived in the Midwest and other places, but it's still there and comes out depending on who I'm talking to. But it's not this accent.

This is Cajun-English, more or less, and most of the people with this accent live in the southwest and south-central part of the state. You remember that Adam Sandler movie "The Waterboy"?

Yeah that's not it. Nobody talks like that.

Justin Wilson though? Yeah, that was a Cajun accent.

And I used to see Justin Wilson all the time on local tv, so I knew that voice, the elongated i's and the irregular verb forms (though I didn't know what that meant then) and the roundabout storytelling. And I also knew what it meant to live in the woods, because the first place we lived in Louisiana was a place called Big Branch which was home at the time to a trailer park (which we didn't live in), a bar and a 5-star restaurant named La Provence, which we never went to. We were so far out we had to drive 15 minutes to get to the nearest store of any kind. Our neighbor still occasionally cooked on a wood-burning stove. We didn't hunt but we were the exception.

So the voice in this poem was way more familiar to me than the other Christmas stories I'd heard.

I run like a rabbit to got to de do',
Trip over de dorg an' fall on de flo'.
As I look out de do' in de light o' de moon,
I t'ink, "Mahn, you crazy or got ol' too soon."

Cuz dere on de by-you w'en I stretch ma' neck stiff,
Dere's eight alligator a pullin' de skiff.
An' a little fat drover wit' a long pole-ing stick,
I know r'at away got to be ole St.Nick.

Mo' fas'er an' fas'er de' gator dey came
He whistle an' holler an' call dem by name:
"Ha, Gaston! Ha, Tiboy! Ha, Pierre an' Alcee'!
Gee, Ninette! Gee, Suzette! Celeste an'Renee'!

To de top o' de porch to de top o' de wall,
Make crawl, alligator, an' be sho' you don' fall."
Like Tante Flo's cat t'ru de treetop he fly,
W'en de big ole houn' dorg come a run hisse's by.

A fun thing to do with this poem is to compare it to the original, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore. Trosclair's poem pretty much follows it beat for beat, which is what you'd expect, both in content and in form. Moore's language is much more high-flown. Compare Moore's language in the stanza and a falf that corresponds with the last one above.

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.



I have to laugh at Moore's use of hurricane there because maybe he'd experienced one in his life but that feels like a really odd descriptor for a gale or gust. And besides, the image of Tante Flo's cat heading to the trees to get away from the dog is so much more evocative and alive.

Trosclair's story is just a lot more fun too.

Den down de chimney I yell wit' a bam,
An' St.Nicklus fall an' sit on de yam.
"Sacre!" he axclaim, "Ma pant got a hole
I done sot ma'se'f on dem red hot coal."

He got on his foots an' jump like de cat
Out to de flo' where he lan' wit' a SPLAT!
He was dress in musk-rat from his head to his foot,
An' his clothes is all dirty wit' ashes an' soot.

A sack full o' playt'ing he t'row on his back,
He look like a burglar an' dass fo' a fack.
His eyes how dey shine his dimple, how merry!
Maybe he been drink de wine from de blackberry.

His cheek was like a rose his nose a cherry,
On secon' t'ought maybe he lap up de sherry.
Wit' snow-white chin whisker an' quiverin' belly,
He shook w'en he laugh like de stromberry jelly!

Among the many questions that 7 year old me had about Santa was how he managed to get down the chimney without getting burned (I was familiar with the Big Bad Wolf's end at the hands of the 3 Little Pigs at this point, of course) and also without getting dirty. Trosclair doesn't try to hand-wave it away with magic. Santa burns a hole in his coat and gets dirty and also maybe looks a little drunk. And best of all, when it's time to go, he makes a good decision.

He put bot' his han' dere on top o' his head,
Cas' an eye on de chimney an' den he done said:
"Wit' all o' dat fire an' dem burnin' hot flame,
Me I ain' goin' back by de way dat I came." 


Santa climbs to the roof, gets in his skiff and floats off behind his alligators to bring presents to all the good little kids in the bayou.

I've cut some pieces out of this poem here but you can read it whole at this website here or even better, you can hear someone with the accent read it and see the illustrations from the book. As luck would have it, this is from the channel for the public school system I attended from second grade through till graduation, St Tammany Parish Public Schools.

As always, thank you for reading Another Poem to Love. I hope you have a happy holiday season no matter which ones you observe. See you next year.