What the whole country is experiencing in these last days before Christmas has the same feel as what New Orleanians felt just before Christmas 15 years ago, less than four months after Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of the Crescent City. There is a sense, just barely, of having survived the worst and the initial aftermath and then, finally, seeing a light in the distance.

This story starts, as most of my fondest Christmas stories start, at Trinity Episcopal School in New Orleans. Its annual Festival of Lessons and Carols service after the last day of December classes was always a thing of both warmth and of a sort of wobbly splendor that can only come when elementary schoolchildren are delivering most of the music and readings. My memories of it were so fond that I drove the two hours from Mobile, Alabama, 27 years after I graduated from Trinity just to see how the school pulled things together amid the post-Katrina squalor.