JANET McCONNAUGHEY
Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Mark Anderson built a painstaking replica of the plantation home where he grew up just so he can burn it down. It's among 125 bonfires to be set ablaze in a Christmas Eve tradition in the river parishes between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Bonfire history goes back at least a century, maybe 250 years or more. Tradition has it that the fires light Papa Noel's way downriver.
Most of the fires are the traditional teepee shape that once towered scores of feet atop the Mississippi River levee along the 12-mile stretch from Convent, some 40 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, to Gramercy, about 45 miles east of New Orleans.