Comfort in the Familiar

It has been quite an adventure trying to adjust to living in a different culture. There are highs that come with each success and lows brought on by homesickness and a feeling of incompetence in doing the simplest of things.

Today France celebrates All Saints Day. I watched the news this morning and saw a segment filmed at a local cemetery. It looked strangely familiar...

The article below is from the 1996 issue of the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany. The authors taught folklore in the Department of English at Louisiana State University.

"...All Saints' has long been an important day in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana, brought from France as La Toussaint (a name for the day which is still used in French-speaking and French-influenced areas of the state). The above-ground cemeteries of the Crescent City, themselves such a distinctive feature of the urban landscape, were virtually mobbed on All Saints' in the 19th century and earlier decades of the twentieth century.

The Feast of All Saints continues to be commemorated because it is part of a still-strong south Louisiana religious tradition (in Lafitte, the priest visits the graves as in Lacombe, and Mass is celebrated in one of the cemeteries, though in the afternoon, not at night as once was the case), and because it is a way of showing respect for the departed.

We wonder, will the All Saints' tradition ... continue into the future? Probably it will. Tradition itself can be a powerful force for its own continuance. People go on doing things because they are traditional and people respect the conservatism of that. Plus, this is a society where family ties are still very strong and All Saints' reinforces that by stressing the ties to deceased members of the family group and the community...."

So the French roots are deep in Louisiana, and there is comfort in that.