Christmas Eve in New Orleans isn’t like it was back in the late 1800s. Today, shoppers fill stores and the internet, ordering last minute gifts while others hit the highways and airports to visit far-off relatives. Most late 19th century New Orleanians enjoyed festive Christmas celebrations at theaters, in the markets and churches, concerts, and dining in restaurants or with family at home. Local Creoles enjoyed their popular late-night meal called the réveillon. But then there were those excruciatingly noisy street rowdies.
As seen in this 1885 Frank Leslie engraving depicting Christmas Eve 1884 in New Orleans, Canal Street and the French Quarter came alive with noisy hooligans who paraded through the streets shooting guns into the air, exploding firecrackers, blowing horns and beating drums like some ancient Druid winter ritual. Apparently, they had gotten so bad that on Christmas Eve 1884, the Daily Picayune claimed the “horn-blowing hoodlum had destroyed the beautiful purpose of Christmas observations.” The paper ran daily reports of these drunken and raucous demonstrations leading up to Christmas day.
Finally yielding to public pressure, New Orleans Mayor J.V. Guillotte issued a proclamation on Dec. 23, 1884, outlawing these “dissipations.”
“I hereby declare,” he wrote, “that all good citizens of the city are called upon, in the employment of the pleasures and dissipation attending the Christmas days, to keep within the bounds of reason, and not act in either a boisterous or ridiculous manner. The shooting of firearms, such as pistols and guns, as also the use by boys of blank cartridges or toy pistols is to be deprecated and is hereby prohibited. It is to be hoped that the good reputation which the city bears abroad for quiet and peace will be maintained and these injunctions obeyed.”
The Catholic Church in New Orleans also was fed up. On Dec. 22, 1884, a Daily Picayune reporter recalled the death of New Orleans Archbishop Napoleon-Joseph Perché on Christmas Eve 1883.
“Last Christmas eve,” he wrote, “the venerable Archbishop Perche was dying in his room at the Archiepiscopal palace. Close by on the landing at the head of the stairs overlooking the entrance, the priestly inmates are accustomed to gather and read and indulge in friendly conversation. It was there that the then Bishop Leray and a reporter who came to inquire after the dying prelate’s condition, were sitting. Notwithstanding the inclement weather, there was the uproar of tin horns and fearful noise of many explosions outside. Bishop Leray expressed his disgust at such a celebration of Christmas. ‘I wish I could stop all this,’ he said, ‘I wish the celebration could be made one of peace and spiritual elevation such as was intended.’”
Well, Francis Xavier Leray did do something about it. Upon Perché’s death, Leray became archbishop, and days prior to Christmas Eve 1884, he issued an edict abolishing midnight Mass throughout the archdiocese. Doing so, he thought, would eliminate large gatherings of people, therefore lessening the “occasion of dissipation, and even scandal” brought about by those noisy outbursts in the streets. “Public morals,” he wrote, “will be best served under this rule.”
One can only wonder if “public morals” had been restored. According to Peggy Scott Laborde and John Magill’s book “Christmas in New Orleans,” the practice of shooting off firecrackers and guns on Christmas Eve continued well into the early 20th century.
