The Year's Last Visitor

The Year’s Last Visitor

Across Cajun Country, a cast of magical figures distribute gifts for the New Year

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

Season after season, right at the heart of the post-Christmas haze—once Claus and his crew have long returned home—another magical figure prepares their visit to Acadiana. Traveling the prairies and the swamplands on the night the world emerges into a new year, this rumored relative of Father Christmas seeks out the little Louisiana children who have posted their invitation: rows of shoes standing before the front door, socks or stockings hanging from the mantelpiece. Inside, the New Year’s Eve visitor will leave behind étrennes—fruit and nuts and candies and other goodies—gifts to celebrate the world’s new beginning.

When I was a child, my family called this figure Papa L’an (“Father Year”). We imagined him as some distant cousin, brother, or uncle of the more famous Santa. We pictured him more lowly, dressed in greens and browns—perhaps even camouflage. We imagined him more like us. Still bearded and fat and mystical—but Cajun. And he only visited Louisiana.

We knew this because for years, our Texas side of the family would visit around New Year’s. My cousins laid their shoes out beside ours—eight single shoes in all, lined up before the front door. This only happened here, they told us.

My mother, a Texan, committed herself early on to carrying forward the Papa L’an tradition, which had been practiced for generations by her Cajun in-laws. Shopping for Christmas always involved grabbing a few petites choses for New Year’s—stretching the magic out for just a few more days. On January 1, our shoes would be filled with each of our favorite candies and often a few knickknacks, and gift cards. And an orange, banana, or apple.

Some of our friends who lived here, we knew, got a visit instead from a woman, Madame Grandnuit (Lady of the Big Night) or Madame Grands Doigts (“Lady Long Fingers”)—who left fruit and sweets just as Papa L’an did. To explain why some of us got him and some of us got her, we decided that the two must be married—splitting the night’s work evenly. In this way, we contributed our own thread to the entangled lore of Cajun New Year's Eve.

The only online evidence of Papa L’an’s existence that I can find is in the comment section of a 2007 blog post by Nicholas Gallimore, and, briefly, in a December 2021 Where Y’at article. Even when I search through old newspaper archives, there is nothing.

But by word of mouth I find him and his “wife” all over Acadiana, especially in my home parish of Evangeline. My grandfather misunderstands me over the phone: “Pop-a-lock?” Then it hits him: “Papa L’an! Of course! He’d fill our stockings with oranges and satsumas.” When I ask around, and do a little crowd-sourcing via Facebook—I get dozens of responses from people across the region, and across the spectrum of generations from millennial to baby boomer. Most of them said they were visited by the Madame as children, but several were hosts to Papa L’an like we were—particularly around Evangeline Parish.

From one household to the other, the tradition gains its own idiosyncrasies and evolutions. No one seems to have practiced it exactly the same. Some people used shoes, some put out knee socks, hats, bowls, pillowcases. Some simply received their New Year’s gifts—almost invariably fruits, nuts, and candy—right under the tree. Some people believed the New Year’s Eve gifts were “things Santa Claus forgot.” Others explained the phenomenon as the Madame or Papa passing out the leftovers from Santa’s Christmas. Still others said that the Cajun iterations of the Clauses were simply poorer than the North Pole royalty, living out here in the prairies and the swamps, sharing what they can.

Many said they still practice the tradition with their children and grandchildren today. “We look forward to this day as much as Christmas morning,” said a Ville Platte resident, Tammy Fontenot.

When I asked Acadiana linguist, historian, and folklorist Ashlee Michot—an Evangeline Parish native—about what she knows of Cajun New Year’s traditions, she responded: “I’ll tell you, all those holiday characters are crossed and mixed as can be.”

But along the German Coast, there’s also La Christine, or La Christiane, or Krish Kin—a character likely carried over from the “Santa Claus” figure of Germany and other Western European countries, the Christkind—who is usually depicted as a blonde, female child dressed in white. Where she is best-known in Louisiana, people leave their stockings and pillowcases out to receive her treats—also the standard fruit, nuts, and candy.

Then there’s Le Petit Bonhomme Janvier (“The Little January Man,”), who in an article published on New Year’s Day, 1997 in The Daily Advertiser, is described as a trickster—an elf-like figure just as likely to fill little children’s shoes with “candy and baubles” as “horse residue” or ashes if they had been bad. The article, written by Chris Segura, goes on to claim that Le Petit Bonhomme Janvier preceded Santa Claus—who didn’t arrive in Acadiana until the late 1880s with an “American” woman named Isabelle Robertson, who introduced the jolly red suit and all he’s come to represent to the area. Since then, Segura writes, Le Petit Bonhomme Janvier is explained as Santa Claus on his way back to the North Pole after Christmas, passing out leftover gifts. Others report visits from Santa Croupee—who might bang loudly on your door in the middle of the night, leaving étrennes behind.

“There’s all of these people, and probably a couple more, and they all kind of overlap—their qualities and their personalities, and what they do when they come,” said Michot, who grew up with Madame Grands Doigts.

The Madame is the best-known of the New Year’s gift-givers, likely because of her alter ego as a terrifying, Cajun witch—described by Mary Alice Fontenot in the Crowley Post Signal in 1979 as a mean old woman with enormous fingers, who visits bad little children and “rubs them out with a great, wide finger, like smashing a mosquito on the window screen. Poo yi!” This is the version of the Madame that Fontenot grew up with—a one-eighty from the benevolent New Year’s Eve visitor of separate-but-related lore. “This is a new version to me,” she writes. “And one that I’m not ready to accept. I prefer to think of the old thing as a frightful, witchy creature, not a goody-goody two shoes.”

Acadiana musician and author Yvette Landry also grew up with the scary iteration of Madame Grands-Doigts—“an otherworldly woman who floats in and out of attics of homes with children”. She remembers her grandmother telling her, “If you don’t go to bed, Madame Grands Doigts is gonna get you.” If you didn’t behave, the Madame would come into your bedroom when you fell asleep, and reach down with her long fingers, and steal you. “I mean, it scared the ever-living bajeezus out of us,” said Landry.

In her 2010 children’s book Madame Grand Doigt, Landry contributes her own addition to the folklore by answering the question that plagued her as a child: What happens to the children after the Madame takes them? Landry imagines the Madame bringing the children to a cabin in the swamp, where she takes their souls and puts them into marsh flies—allowing them the power to give off light. “So, when you see fireflies on the banks of the bayou at night, they’re really the souls of children.”

In his 2021 book Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, Nathan Rabalais, a Eunice native and the French Louisiana specialist in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, explores the dual identity of the Madame—whose “unusu ally long fingers are used to reach into hung stockings to deposit treats, or to strike fear.”

As is the case with much of oral history-based folklore—it is difficult to know where the Jekyll and Hyde effect happened exactly, or even which version of the Madame came first. Her evil persona serves a familiar folkloric purpose when it comes to children’s tales: as a threat to children who wander where they don’t belong, such as in an attic or in dangerous parts of the woods. As a “Mrs. Santa Claus” figure for New Year’s, she serves as motivation—like Santa—for children to behave all year long.

“What is unique about Madame Grands Doigts is that she plays, depending upon the region and the family, both of the roles, but never at the same time or in the same family,” writes Rabalais.

While this is reflective of many people’s relationship to Lady Long Fingers (mine, Michot’s, Landry’s, Mary Alice Fontenot’s), I’d argue that the two versions have on occasion been melded, as various accounts tell of how the Madame, and many of the other New Year’s Cajun figures, would treat “good” children with the rewards of gifts and would terrorize “bad” children by pulling on their toes in the middle of the night or stealing all of their Christmas presents.

Captivated, as Landry was, by the untold elements of the Madame’s story, another Louisiana musician and writer Johnette Downing chose her as the subject of a 2017 children’s book—which imagines a sympathetic backstory for the Madame that explains her dual personalities.

“I wondered, ‘How did this tradition start?’ But as you know, there’s really nothing … it was just such one note. Let’s give her some history, let’s give her some backstory. So, I just created a story of how she became Madame Grands Doigts by being Mademoiselle. I wanted to make sure that the tradition was preserved beyond just ‘She puts oranges in our stockings for New Years’ or ‘She pokes you with her long fingers.’”

In Downing’s story, Mademoiselle Grands Doigts was the daughter of Papa L’an. She was a generous, beautiful young woman known for her pretty fingers and hands. Because of her many suitors, the other girls in the village became envious, and cast a spell on her. She awoke one morning to “her lovely long fingers covered in warts ….her hands ugly and knobby in parts. Her skin was scaly like a crawfish sack and she had bumps on her face and a hump on her back. Her nose was like a beak of a crane, and her hair looked like moss from her bed after rain.” She moved into the attic, where she hid for the rest of her life—and gained a reputation as a frightening, monstrous woman with long, creepy fingers. So Downing’s story goes, though, the Mademoiselle’s generous spirit has never wavered. Every New Year’s Eve, if little children put out their shoes and stockings, she will fill them with fruits, gifts, and sweets. “Mademoiselle Grands Doigts blesses all good children each year on that one night.”

Read on! Find Rabalais’s Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana at lsupress.org, Landry’s Madame Grand Doigt at ulpress.org, and Downing’s Mademoiselle Grands Doigts at pelicanpub.com.