6 Best Performing Arts Venues in New Orleans, Louisiana

City Park's majestic oaks, Botanical Gardens, Carousel Garden, and Storyland amusement park are awash in holiday lights and decorations during this popular weeks-long event. You'll find food and rides, a miniature train decked out for Christmas, and entertainment by local school groups.

Socialite Germaine Wells, step-daughter of the founder of Arnaud's Restaurant (and eventually its owner), started this New York–style Easter Parade in the French Quarter in 1956. Her legacy lives on, as women riding in convertibles and carriages don floppy chapeaus and hand out stuffed bunnies along the route. The parade ends in time for noon Mass at St. Louis Cathedral.

Fashion takes a front seat at this parade, which ambles through the Quarter midafternoon on Easter Sunday, passing gay and gay-owned bars, restaurants and shops.

For more than 65 years, the Irish Channel St. Patrick's Day Club has put on a Saturday-afternoon-before-St. Paddy's Day parade with floats, bands and marching groups. Preferred throws here include green beads, cabbages, carrots and the occasional potato.

Every July, heralded mixologists, distillers, writers, chefs, and cocktail connoisseurs converge in the city for several days of cocktail competitions, seminars, tastings, pairing dinners and other spirited events.