Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 1997

Santa replaced Little Man January in Cajun tradition

Chris Segura, Acadiana Correspondent

ABBEVILLE -- In the beginning, Santa didn't come to Cajun children on Christmas Day. In fact, that didn't happen until the late 1800s.

Children had to wait another week until Jan. 1 for Le Petit Bonhomme Janvier--the "Little Man January"--for their gifts.

And Bonhomme was a trickster; in Cajun parlance un joueur.

Children would arrange their shoes under their beds and if they had been good all year they received candy or baubles.

Otherwise, the Bonhomme would arrange another kind of surprise.

There is the story of the boy who wanted a horse for the holidays but found his shoes filled with horse residue, instead.

Undaunted, he commented that he had been brought a horse but it had gotten away during the night.

The theory was that on Dec. 25, God became man, not a time for rejoicing.

However, on the Feast of the Circumcision--now called by the Catholic Church the Feast of Mary the Mother of God on January 1--Jesus assumed his theistic responsibilities, setting into motion the eventual redemption of mankind.

It was time for us to party, or in Cajun French: "Retons."

The modern Christmas came to Acadiana with the arrival of an "American" woman to St. Martinville with the railroad in the late 1880s.

Her name was Isabelle Robertson. She taught her Cajun neighbors to make Christmas ornaments out of crystallized salt and alum on cured Spanish moss and to cut cypress saplings when other conifers were not available to decorate their houses.

So, in a sense, the Christmas shopping rush in Acadiana owes its invention to that good-hearted Yankee woman who was eventually murdered with her daughter on August 12, 1891, in the boarding house she ran in St. Martinville.

The double murder was never solved, but the concept of Santa Claus and Christmas gift-giving spread exuberantly in these lowlands.

In the early part of this century, the Le Petit Bonhomme Janvier still visited on January 1. But little children were told that it was Santa Claus on his way back to the North Pole, passing out leftover gifts.

So Bonhomme, the trickster, was eclipsed by the jolly elf, old St. Nick.

Even today, however, there are those in Acadiana who say that after all the ho-ho-hos have been sounded and the winter settles into Bachanalian celebration and the hangovers of 12 months of travail are carried into the early morning hours of a brand-new year, one can still hear the chuckles of the little trickster.

When that happens you will know that Le Petit Bonhomme Janvier has arrived, as expected on January 1.

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