Voices: Our post-Katrina Christmas still moves us

I'm pretty sure no Christmas dinner will ever match the one we ate 10 years ago with the restaurant refugees of New Orleans.

After Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing flood devastated lower Louisiana, my wife headed south for what ended up being about a year-long assignment helping FEMA run its recovery operation out of Baton Rouge.

When it became clear she was not coming home any time soon, we decided I'd fly down and meet her for Christmas. We booked a hotel in downtown New Orleans, just off the French Quarter (lots of empty rooms.) This was four months after the storm, and vast swaths of the city were still largely abandoned, without power and covered in rubble. Not knowing what we would find there, we brought a bag full of wine and cheese and crackers and olives, figuring we could have a Christmas picnic in our hotel room.

But on Christmas Eve, we started a conversations with Larry, the waiter in the hotel restaurant (lots of empty tables.) He said his pals in the food service business were all out of work, since so few of the New Orleans restaurants had reopened. A bunch of them were getting together at a closed restaurant a few blocks away for a pot luck Christmas dinner, he said, and we should join them.

We did.

I have never had a Christmas dinner that was a better reflection of the holiday.

Gathered in a shuttered restaurant were about a dozen people who knew each other largely from the after-hours bars where wait staff hang out after the last seating is cleared away. Their families had scattered with the storm, many of their homes were damaged, and none of the restaurants were open, so nobody had anyplace else to go on Christmas.

We all brought what we had — Molly and I brought our bag of wine and cheese; the restaurant manager opened the kitchen and roasted a turducken; somebody else made or brought some desserts; and of course there was champagne.

We laughed and we celebrated, but there was a heavy blanket of sadness that padded the afternoon. The city around us was in ruins, and everybody in the room lived a disrupted life. We talked about the blessing of having survived, the challenges that lay ahead, and the joys of Christmases past and, hopefully, future. No one there but me would be going back to a fully furnished home, a fully functional workplace, a fully assembled family. And even I was leaving my wife behind with these ragtag refugees.

Honestly, it was not the most fun we have ever had on Christmas. But we left that party with the warmest of glows in our hearts. That's what Christmas is really about, we decided — a group of strangers with more sadness than supplies gather together to share their provisions and manufacture a little joy. For those few hours, we all had someplace to be, and all the chaos around us would just have to wait.

I've never been in touch with any of those people again. But I will always be grateful for the day they made room at the inn for us.

Merry Christmas, New Orleans, and thank you.

Singer is Paste BN's Washington correspondent.