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As a small child, growing up in the soggy scenery of Louisiana, the "Fatback Outback"" of the Blues Country, I observed holidays within the patterns common to the region and its simple, kindly people. Kindly indeed we were, though our recreations and avocations leaned toward the childish and brutal.
One of our great Yuletide delights was to dig a hibernating alligator from its den, and then, laying hands to the abundant stock of rudimentary, gardening implements with which we wrung our meager supply of okra, peppers and perique tobacco from the sodden soils of the Evangeline region, to coax the alligator into the state best suited for our holiday larders, that is to say, death.
The alligators, being of similar inclination and sensibilities to we Cajuns, with only the substitution of gnashing teeth and battering tail for hoes and axe handles, were not averse to adding the occasional luckless Louisianian to their own diets when circumstances permitted. Though outsiders sometimes labelled our habits and hobbies savage and primitive, we were content that our games with the bayoudwelling lizards were wholesome and fair, and the outsiders did not always return to their effete East Coast metropolises to malign our ways.
On Christmas Eve, it was our custom to attend evening services at a church in Sabine, a pleasant village on high ground near our bayou home. A clear memory from childhood which I shall always associate with this season, I guarantee, is of an amusing incident which occurred as we made our way home after one such Yuletide service. As we picked our way gingerly from one relatively dry spot to the next, virtually hopping back to the possumandpepper surprise bubbling cheerily on the hearth in our shanty, my brother's residual enthusiasm for the religious service we had just attended led him to begin singing ''All Things Bright And Beautiful" in broken French with such reckless abandon that he wandered from Mere, Grandpere, Parrain, Oncle, Bebe, and the rest of our kindred.
Readers pausing here to momentarily ponder the aesthetic limitations of "All Things Bright And Beautiful" in broken French will understand why we allowed my brother to continue on his way alone. However, as sound travels well over water, we were able to monitor his progress from afar and piece together the droll incident which followed.
Several hundred yards to our left, disdaining paths and bridges in his fervor, he threaded his way through the canebrake, accompanying his raucous chanson with random skips and splendid twirls. At the very moment we began to cross a certain creek on a cypress log footbridge, we heard him switch to "I'm Going Down To The River Jordan, I Guarantee" and proceed to splash across the streamlet. Sensing movement nearby in the black waters and caught up in spiritual ardor, he incorrectly identified his unseen associate as a ghost. "Ho, Spirit, leave me be! I leave okra beside de cabin fo' you tomorrer, first thing, I guarantee," he iterated, adding other such edgeless entreaties. Well, by the time we got to him, he'd had a large bite taken out of his leg and three ribs broken by horrific lashings of a reptile's tail, and a miscellany of lacerations which led him to suspect that his holiday companion in that creek was alligator rather than apparition.
Those brave days are gone, yet imperishable in our family memories and sure to give rise to nostalgic chuckles each holiday season as the tale is retold in our cabin, now graced by a microwave oven which hums along on a low setting as the aroma of possumandpepper surprise evokes Yule spirit within us all.
These pages describe the delusions, fantasies &