Christmas Characters

Meet and interact with some of the famous, the infamous, and the everyday women and men that have made New Orleans fascinating for over 200 years. Join these guests from the past for special presentations as they re-create the local traditions and customs of earlier times. Engaging performances really bring to life the music, humor, dance, conversations, social gatherings, and storytelling of New Orleans’ past.

Our guests from the past will make appearances at restaurants and hotels in the French Quarter and along Decatur, Royal and Chartres streets.

Daily Strolling Schedule

Daily Strolling Schedule includes the Historical Characters strolling Decatur, Royal and Chartres streets, visiting historic homes, museums and monuments. Inclement weather plan—the historical characters will stroll the Riverwalk and The Shops at Canal Place.

December 1-25

Thursday, Friday, Saturday And Sunday Only
Begin at 11am at the Hotel Monteleone. Stroll Decatur, Royal and Chartres streets, ending each day at 3pm at one of the following locations:

• Bourbon House
• Pat O’s Tavern
• Napoleon House
• The Court of Two Sisters
• Hotel Monteleone’s Le Café
  

Schedules and locations are subject to change without notice. Papa Noël This French fur trapper is a representation of the traditional Louisiana Bayou version of Santa Claus. An 18th/19th-century blend of Creole, French, and Cajun cultures, Papa Noël is endowed with mystical and magical powers by which he has transported our guests from the past here to share “Christmas New Orleans Style.” He is the host of the company, magically transporting these interesting historical characters forward in time to experience New Orleans during Christmas in 2007.

Thomy Lafon Philanthropist
1810-1893
A free man of color, Thomy made his fortune in real estate and savvy business investments, much of which he gave away to charities and the arts. During his lifetime, he collected nearly half a million dollars, funds which at his death went toward the founding of the Home for Aged Colored Men and Women and the Lafon Orphan Boys’ Asylum. He also bequeathed large sums to Charity Hospital, the Society of the Holy Family, and the Shakespeare Alms House. Lafon Nursing Home is just one of his “gifts” remaining today as his contribution to the city of New Orleans.

Marie Laveau
Spiritualist/Herbalist/Social Activist, 1783-1881
Also known as “The Widow Paris,” and a hairdresser by trade, her fabled powers as a voodoo queen are overshadowed by her social activism. Marie used her influence to bring about social change, rallying successfully for the abolition of public hangings in Jackson Square. A devout Catholic, she spent her life attending to those less fortunate. Her knowledge of herbs saved many lives during the city’s epidemics.

Jean Lafitte
The Gentleman Pirate, circa 1780-1825
Also called “The Corsair,” “The Buccaneer,” “The King of Barataria,” “The Terror of the Gulf,” and “The Hero of New Orleans,” Jean Lafitte is known for his piracy in the Gulf of Mexico and lauded for his heroism in the Battle of New Orleans. Each persona seems to balance the other. He hated being called a “pirate,” for, as he saw it, he was a “privateer” serving an economic purpose in an economically frugal time in a new country that needed to economize. Lord Byron sketched a poem about him, and countless books have been written about his adventures. There is a national park named after him as well as a city, which sits along the Mississippi River below New Orleans.

Baroness Pontalba
Developer 1795-1874
Micaela Almonaster was a stubborn, fiercely determined woman who survived four bullets in the chest and lived. She was the daughter of Don Andres Almonaster, who was the city’s master builder and constructor of the Cathedral, Cabildo, and Presbytere. The Baroness Pontalba built a monument to her beloved father, the Pontalba Apartments, on the Place d’Armes (Jackson Square).

Basile Croquere
Fencing Master circa 1820-1870
A quadroon educated in Paris, Croquere gained a reputation for his well-mannered, charming personality and skills as a dance master. He was considered the handsomest man in New Orleans. A man of many talents, he was a noted mathematician and teacher, a carpenter known as the cleverest constructor of stairways in New Orleans, and the finest fencing master in the city. He taught the cream of Creole society but never fought a duel due to his race.

Sister Henriette
Delille Founder, Sisters of the Holy Family, 1812-1862
Born a free woman of color, Henriette founded the Sisters of the Holy Family, the only order of black nuns in the history of New Orleans. Sister Delille turned her back on her wealth and devoted her life to God’s children.

C.C. Antoine
Lt. Governor of Louisiana (1872-1880), 1836-1921
Born a free man in New Orleans, son of a mulatto veteran of the War of 1812, he was educated in both French and English. He was an editor, businessman (partnered with P.B.S. Pinchback in a cotton factorage, president of the Cosmopolitan Life Ins. Co.), and soldier (he organized a black New Orleans unit for the Union Army). In 1890 he served as vice president of New Orleans Comité des Citoyens, formed by free people of color to fight legal battles against discrimination, challenging Jim Crow laws in the celebrated “Plessy vs. Ferguson” case of 1896.

Madame Begue
Restaurateur, 1831-1906
Breakfast at Begue’s was the height of the New Orleans experience in the second half of the 1800s. In a small upstairs dining room in the French Market, Elizabeth Begue served some of the finest food in the South and began the tradition of “brunch.” Madame Begue did all the cooking, and her husband, who ran the butcher shop below, was the sole waiter. They served New Orleans’ Creole families in charming style after they lost their great kitchens and French chefs.

Rose Nicaud
First coffee vendor in New Orleans, 1804-1870
A free woman of color, Rose set up a portable stand to provide members of the village with her excellent brew as they traveled to market or to the Cathedral for Mass. She was so successful that she acquired a permanent stand in the French Market. One customer said her coffee was “like the benediction that follows the prayer.” Soon, several coffee stands began to appear in the city as a result of her success.

Josie Arlington
Storyville Madame, circa 1864-1914
One of Storyville’s preeminent demimondaines, Josie Arlington was the owner and proprietress of the Arlington, “absolutely and unquestionably the most decorative and costly fitted-out Sporting Palace ever placed before the American Public.” Her 20-year partnership with state legislator Tom Anderson cemented her position as not only one of the most colorful figures in the notorious red-light district, but one of the wealthiest and most successful business owners in all of New Orleans and one of the most financially and politically powerful women of her time.

General Andrew Jackson
Seventh U.S. President (1829-1837), 1767-1845
During the War of 1812, he won the greatest American victory in the Battle of New Orleans and became known as “The Hero of New Orleans.” Also known as “Old Hickory,” he is equally admired in his home state of Tennessee.

Lola Montez
Actress/Spanish interpretive dancer, circa 1818-1861
The infamous Lola reigned on the New Orleans stage during her annual appearances from 1849 to 1860. Her notorious temper and her propensity to exaggerate the truth made her one of the most talked-about ladies in the salon circle. Scandal often followed on the heels of critical acclaim, and many a suitor found himself in court defending his name and property against Lola’s accusations. Nevertheless, she remained a favorite of the gentry and a darling of the press until her final visit before the start of the Civil War.

Essie Whitman
Dancer, circa 1863-1959
One of the famous Whitman Sisters who carried New Orleans music up the Mississippi and across the mid-American continent. She employed the young Louis Armstrong for tours of the Theater Owners Booking Association, renamed by the artists “Tough on Black Actors.”

John James Audubon
Ornithologist, artist, and naturalist, 1785-1851
Audubon was born in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and plantation owner and his French mistress. He was raised in Nantes, France. In 1803, at the age of 18, he was sent to Philadelphia. Audubon set off on his epic quest to depict America’s avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist’s materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, he lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence in the South. In 1826, he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. His life-sized, highly dramatic bird portraits, along with his embellished descriptions of wilderness life, hit just the right note at the height of the continent’s Romantic era.

Edmond Dede
Composer, violinist, and conductor, 1827-1903
Dede was a free Creole of color whose parents arrived from the French West Indies around 1809. His father was a bandmaster for a militia unit. Dede studied violin with a free black violinist; the Italian director of the St. Charles Theatre orchestra and one of the earliest publishers of music in the city; the French winner of the 1831 Prix de Rome, who conducted the orchestra at the Théâtre d’Orléans; and with New York-born free black musician Charles Richard Lambert, father of Sidney and Lucièn Lambert, and a conductor of the Philharmonic Society, which was the first non-theatrical orchestra in the city and even included some white musicians among its one hundred instrumentalists, an extremely large aggregation for the time. In 1852 Dede’s melody “Mon Pauvre Coeur” appeared.

It is the oldest surviving piece of sheet music by a New Orleans Creole of color. He supplemented his income from music with a day job as a cigar maker. He won an audition in 1857 to attend the Paris Conservatoire de Musique.