1 wise man screaming, 2 shepherds wrestling, and 3 baby Jesuses
A LaHaye-Dupré holiday tradition
On Thanksgiving Day, 1955, my great uncle Glenn LaHaye married his sweetheart, my great aunt Janie.
Shortly after the wedding, noted by the Daily World, as “one of the loveliest events of the year,” (oh the days when our small town papers could afford to send reporters to local weddings) the maid of honor and the best man began their own love affair. Janie’s sister, Susan, and Wayne’s brother, Glenn, were married just six years later, in the very same church, with almost exactly the same guests. These, of course, are my grandparents.
The LaHaye-Dupre web has remained intertwined ever since; my dad and his first cousins growing up all on LaHaye Road together, genetically as close as half siblings. Glenn and Janie settled to the right of his father Aubrey, and Wayne and Susan to the left. Evangeline Parish is already a world where place ties us together: we all eat the same kind of food, watch the same rice field sunsets, attend the same Catholic churches, know all the same people. But on LaHaye Road, the blood ran thick.
Almost seventy years since our families came together, the LaHayes and the Duprés still gather every Christmas season. And oh, have we multiplied. Many of us have moved away from Evangeline Parish (though, the vast majority are still within about a two hour drive), but this holiday party has maintained its influence, drawing us all back to each other to drink (abundantly) and eat potluck-style (traditional dishes crowd a table: beef tongue, sausage bread, whatever game someone’s scored lately, Aunt Michele’s chocolate chip pecan cookies) and be merry each year. Growing up, these were our uncles and aunts and our cousins—it didn’t matter how far apart on the family tree we actually were. And it grows ever more extended by the year. But this is our family.
The centerpiece of the night, which is simultaneously a rite of passage, is the Nativity play. You are initiated the year you are born, when you lay in a wooden manger my grandfather found in a junkpile fifty-odd years ago, a tinsel halo on your head. If there is more than one child born in a particular year, we have more than one baby Jesus ( in some years, we’ve had as many as four). From a box of costumes emerge tiny capes of fleece, veils, crowns. The family toddlers are dressed as sheep, donkeys, and cattle. By the time you are in grade school, you can be a shepherd, or an angel, or a wise man (there are often more than three), or the drummer boy. The oldest children each take their turns in the main roles: as the archangel Gabriel, Joseph, and Mary. And finally, just when you are starting to get to the age when you think you have outgrown the whole thing, Mommee Susan will ask, in a way that you can’t refuse, that you be the narrator—shouting over the chaos of screaming children to tell the story of Christ’s birth. Renditions of “We Three Kings,” “Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel,” and “What Child is This” are sung by the family talent. And it all ends with the matriarch—in my lifetime, it has been my great grandmother “MawMaw” Emily, my Great Aunt Janie, my grandmother “Mommee” Susan—handing out gold chocolate coins to all of the cast at the end.
I asked my dad how this tradition began, and he just remembered doing it throughout his childhood—first at his grandmother “MeeMom” Dulcie Dupré’s, then later at his MawMaw Emily LaHaye’s, and then finally, during my lifetime, at MawMaw’s apartment in the back of his parents’ (Mommee Susan and Papa Wayne’s house). After MawMaw died in 2006, the party was officially “passed” on to Mommee—moved into the main part of her house, squeezed tight with the hundred-or-so of us, dressed to the nines around the Christmas tree. The nativity would unfold in the living room, the acoustics of the whole scenario laughable—a mélange of children dressed in robes screaming, the choir singing, drunk adults conversing, mothers trying to get pictures of their children, and over it all, Mommee—with a huge, unruffled smile, orchestrating it all.
I remember so clearly the year my brother Jack was baby Jesus. He shared the cradle with our cousin Maria. Both babies were about six months old, and Jack was sitting up in the manger. I was six years old and dressed as a shepherd, I think, or maybe a wise man or an angel. I was kneeling right in front of it—I’m sure some adult had told me to watch over my baby brother. And I was furious with him, because every time I tried to lay him down, he’d scream. He wanted to sit. Jesus couldn’t sit right after he was born! I kept thinking, panicked—sure he was ruining it all. There was a sense of magic to the whole thing; I didn’t want the spell broken.
And of course, it wasn’t. Nothing, not tantrumming drummer boys nor spilled wine nor a lost king’s crown could ever diminish the rich, warm heart at the center of all of it. This is why it’s survived for so long.
When I asked Mommee Susan about the nativity tradition, she admitted—a little sheepishly—that it had actually been her idea. This doesn’t surprise me. Growing up, she was always an organizer of family spectacles. We had synchronized swimming performances on July 4, Easter parades through the yard. Of course this had originated with her. She told me the nativity began sometime early in her and Papa’s marriage, shortly after she became a mother. She couldn’t remember the first baby Jesus for sure, but she thought it might have been her eldest, my Parrain Danny.
During that time, my Mommee Susan was a new mother and had just left her teaching job at a Catholic school in New Orleans—where she had been in charge of organizing a Nativity play put on by the high schoolers. She told the family, “We could do this! The kids would love it!” And in her way, she enlisted carolers and collected costumes, she created wise men and shepherds out of my little uncles, angels out of my little aunts. “They always loved it,” Mommee recalls of the children. “They were always so beautiful, so precious. It made Christmas very special.”
In the initial years of the LaHaye-Dupré marriages, there were parties on each side of the family—grand affairs with dozens of cousins each on their own. My Aunt Suzette remembers the very first time the nativity was staged at MawMaw Emily’s Christmas party. The Baby Jesus that year was my Uncle Jay. The year would have been 1968. My Uncle Henry remembers when his daughter Amie was baby Jesus in 1976—that year there was a nativity at Meemom Dulcie’s house. Eventually, at some point, these parties came together into the single shared LaHaye-Dupré celebration I was born into.
Almost sixty years later, in 2024 the LaHaye-Dupré nativity was held at my Parrain Danny and Aunt Michele’s home—which was MawMaw Emily and PawPaw Aubrey’s home. It’s come full circle; Aunt Michele took over the party few years ago, as my grandparents climbed into their eighties. Now, instead of in a crowded living room, the nativity is staged in the backyard, beneath a makeshift wooden stable and the twinkle of Christmas lights. And this year, there were two babies. One was Graham Edward Ortego, Uncle Glenn’s great grandson. And the other was Papa Wayne’s great grandson, my uncle Jay’s grandson and namesake, John Christian III “Johnny” LaHaye. Three generations in, we’re still all gathered around that manger.
If you enjoyed this, please share some of your family holiday traditions in the comments below!
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As an in-law to this family through Henry, Susan's brother, I feel a real connection to this story. The Nativity play is the focal point of the children's Christmas and the pride we all share in the beauty of our offspring. It's quite remarkable that every child born into this family goes though the privileged passage of serving as Jesus in the wooden manager. That wood could surely be called a relic after three generations. Thanks for lovingly recording the tradition through your words, Jordan.
Wonderfully written in a most loving and enduring respect for family traditions! Merci beaucoup !