LAPLACE — Years ago in St. John the Baptist Parish, Josh Weidert and his friends watched as their fathers built teepee style bonfires along the Mississippi River levee, continuing a centuries old Christmas Eve tradition.

The boys worked alongside their fathers, building their own smaller structures to practice for the day they would be entrusted with the real deal. Little did anyone know, those boys would grow up to form the group Blood, Sweat, and Bonfires. The structures they would create, ranging from a Saints helmet to a Pelican hovering above her baby birds in a nest, would challenge all preconceived notions of what a bonfire can be.

This year’s addition to the burning tradition is an alligator stretching more than 60 feet long. Weidert is placing finishing touches on a 10-foot long alligator head that will soon be attached to a 23-foot long body and a winding tail that measures approximately 35 feet in length. The public is welcome to view and enjoy the bonfire on top of the levee near South Church Street in Garyville.

The bonfire will be complete within the next couple of days, according to Weidert, and this year’s creation brings a little something extra. For the first time, children and adults who visit the bonfire can climb inside and use controls to move the gator’s head from side to side and snap the jaw open and shut.

Planning for this year’s bonfire started in July.

“We are doing an alligator by popular demand because people have been asking for the past three years when we were going to do one,” Weidert said. “The controls will be on the inside of it. It will be a similar set up to a two-pilot fighter jet.”

Sophisticated movements and controls have made this bonfire one of the more challenging construction projects for the group.

“It’s bigger, more detailed, and the head is probably one of the most complicated things I’ve ever built for a bonfire,” Weidert said. “On Christmas Eve, we’re going to light it at 7 p.m. Everybody is invited to come out and see it.”

The burning of last year’s bonfire attracted at least 600 people. The men put out a guest book a few days before Christmas Eve and found visitors had traveled to see it from 34 states and nine countries, including the Philippines, Canada, Australia, Brazil and other points around the globe.

This year, there will be a new audience as the bonfire lights up the sky on Christmas Eve. Blood, Sweat, and Bonfires is working with a production company to film a segment for a television show that will air on Chip and Joanna Gaines’ up and coming Magnolia Network in December 2020.

The show will focus on customs and traditions around the country.

As the Blood, Sweat, and Bonfires men say, “It ain’t no joke!” Every bonfire the group has constructed over the past 11 years has taken an extraordinary amount of labor and attention to detail, according to Sonny Kilburn.

“First we obtain the permit from the parish. Then we go out to the woods and cut the trees down from the back of the levee,” Kilburn said. “This year is different than the rest of them. The other teepees are pretty simple in terms of stacking logs on top of each other. With these it is challenging because you have to have the logs in the right place and know where everything is going when you are starting to build it.”

However, all the hard work is worth it in the end when he sees the expressions of amazement in the children who see the bonfires. Maybe one day, they will be the ones to carry on the tradition.

“We’re keeping the tradition alive for the kids to show them how we celebrate Christmas in Louisiana,” Kilburn said. “We are just trying to keep the Louisiana theme and an alligator is about the best way we can represent Louisiana.”

Weidert said bonfires are what define the Christmas holidays for him and his friends.

“Christmas is about family and Jesus and the tradition that is laced in to all of that,” he said. “This is our tradition, and it’s just something that we cherish as a group. The holidays are supposed to bring friends and families together, and this is our way of doing that.”

For more information, visit Blood, Sweat, and Bonfires on Facebook.