"Thanksgiving in New Orleans, A Dream"

We took Thanksgiving dinner in the nearby faraway French Quarter, at Chateau Sonesta on rue Iberville. It was first choice, though it flew in the face of our spotty tradition of going to the Fairmont Hotel for Sazeracs with all the trimmings.

At the Fairmont the week before, L. A. Narma said, "Now it is the fortieth anniversary!" We sat in the Sazerac Room remembering how she had been here in 1963 when first she heard the news President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, and how each year the story fades from collective memory.

"It's sad," the bartender said, "but maybe necessary. New grief is fresh, old grief grows distant and then it is forgotten."

"They are all gone now," Norma said of those in the President's car that day, "but Governor Connally's wife."

This year, Norma wanted to make Thanksgiving Day a literary pilgrimage to the former D. H. Holmes Department Store, now home to this comfortable hotel Chateau Sonesta, with its nearly life-size bronze statue of Ignatius J. Reilly standing "under the clock" where he met his Mother on the opening pages of John Kennedy Toole's knee-slapping A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES (Grove Press/Black Cat paperback), a corker of a novel set in old New Orleans, circa forever.

A few years ago I attended a party for this statue. It stood fresh and without patina in a corner of the hotel's crowded banquet hall, silently eyeing press freeloaders, and others more respectable, gathered to admire Ignatius in his bronzed ear flaps. We nibbled some of the tastiest foods every passed round upon a silver tray. Periodically, hotel staffers led bunches of us by the wine bottle to elevators and up to the grand-opening spotlight of the evening: The John Kennedy Toole Suite directly over The Clock.

Our Thanksgiving buffet was terrific. We had the tenderest turkey breasts ever bared before a bigger than life ice-sculpture of Tom Turkey himself in full tail fan. A true feast from the bountiful harvest.

We sat in the lobby afterwords stealing matchbooks from polished ashtrays that looked as if they might clatter to the floor if we lit our ten-dollar cigars. A hotel staffer had "advised" against smoking cigars.

"These days, you might as well light a stick of dynamite," Norma groused to a maid placing a fresh pack of matches in the gleaming ashtray beside her elbow. The maid smiled, then went across the room and whispered in the ear of a large man in a dark suit.

Out on Canal Street, under The Clock, we lit our cigars and nodded to Ignatius, our old friend. He didn't look a day older than the last time we had seen him. Carnival beads hung from the bronze scarf around his neck, and an unopened package of black condoms rested in the hand he held behind his back with palm turned up.

Christmas sales are said to be better than expected in some shops, and less in others. Macy's, in the New Orleans Centre, looked crowded enough when I was there. Leaving, I found a yellow silk ribbon by the bus stop in front of Lord and Taylor's. I picked it up and tied it to the little wooden stick bearing a small American flag stanchioned to my bike's handlebars. It looked good there, along with a miniature plastic King Cake (a Carnival throw from some forgotten year) and three silk flowers in City tricolor. Like the Bali natives say, "We have no art, we do everything as well as we can." At least they said that in the days before terrorism's War Without End.

Meanwhile, back at the Fairmont, the Angel Hair Lobby is up and very much worth the visit. And the Royal Sonesta Hotel, older sister of Chateau Sonesta, threw its annual Plum Pudding Stirring Party for press freeloaders and others. This spit-and-polish paradise of a hotel is astonishingly just a doorman's tug off Bourbon Street, the world's most ruckus slough rue.

We are lucky to live where we do. Lucky to be in this Great Swamp City without bother of having our luggage searched. Happy Holidays to you, whatever your flavor or faith, and may the Season guide our leaders to peace.

Peace or not, remember the fast fading two hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase -- a celebration ignored, if not forgotten, under clouds of our new elective war.

Also, this month is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the New Orleans Museum of Art's blockbuster King Tut exhibition. In celebration, NOMA has mounted another terrific Egyptian show, "The Quest for Immortality, Treasures of Ancient Egypt." The new NOMA Nile is not to be missed. Through February 25. (More information is at www.noma.org)

Museum Director, for both exhibitions, John Bullard joshed at opening ceremonies, "One must be careful not to say, 'It fits New Orleans quest for immorality.' " The Underworld River meets the Mississippi? O, all right! It was just a joke.

"Faulkner Festival," The City's prestigious literary festival (actually named "Words and Music Arts Festival"), founded by Faulkner House Books owners Rosemary James and Joseph DeSalvo; and longtime Faubourg Marigny resident Kenneth Holditch, to honor the work of William Faulkner, who lived in the Pirates Alley book shop (then a rooming house) while writing A SOLDIER'S PAY, opens its fourteenth celebration December 4. For more information go to www.wordsandmusic.org

One last sweet note, our new friend in the Marigny:

Congratulations to the new president of the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association, GiO, the legendary burlesque star of Bourbon Street. We do live well, indeed, in the shadow of war.