With less than one-quarter of its population back in the city, where thousands of homes were destroyed, the authorities scheduled no public events for the holiday and did not decorate the streets for the occasion.

But for those that had returned or come to rebuild the southern city, community activists organized a midday pot-luck public feast in the French Quarter's historic Jackson Square.

Billed as the "No One Home Alone Gathering," participants were invited to bring a dish and celebrate the holiday under the cool and sunny skies.

"We know that thousands of people in New Orleans will be alone or far from their loved ones during the holidays," said history professor Lance Hill, who promoted the event with his wife.

Fending off the cold outside her uninhabitable home in the Bayou St. John neighborhood, Kim McDaniel said the holiday spirit has passed her by this year. "I just can't get with it this year," she said.

The massive hurricane Katrina flooded her home with seven feet (2.1 meters) of water and toxic black oil from a neighboring refinery when it blasted through on August 29.

Like hundreds of thousands of others displaced by the storm, McDaniel and her family are living in cramped quarters with family and friends. McDaniel's daughter Courtni Williams, 14, said some of her friends who lost their homes are taking medication for depression.

Katrina destroyed or badly damaged 130,000 of the 200,000 homes in New Orleans when it struck, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.

With housing in short supply, more than three-quarters of the city's pre-Katrina population of 460,000 have not yet returned, despite repeated pleas by Mayor Ray Nagin. Those evacuees who do return come home to widespread homelessness and double-digit unemployment.

Seventy-five percent of all city police and firefighters are homeless and live with their families on cruise ships or in hotels.

Area apartment complexes have waiting lists for hundreds of families. Tent cities flourish. Families are "doubling up," and some people sleep in their garages.

Nagin says electricity and gas services are 75 percent restored since the hurricane. But like thousands of residents, Courtni's grandmother Sharon McDaniel can attest that even available utilities cannot be easily accessed.

Four months after most of the city flooded, her pink-shuttered two-story house still has no electricity. And there is no power for the trailer that the Federal Emergency Management Agency put in her yard several weeks ago.

Because her home flooded, she says, the utility company will not turn on her electricity until she gets an inspection by an electrician and a permit from the city.

City Hall, crippled by 3,000 recent storm-related layoffs, is overwhelmed by requests for permits.

As Kim McDaniel managed to salvage the artificial "singing" Christmas tree from the attic after the storm, her family drew on memories of Christmas past help to warm their spirits, including the Christmas dinner of hot pork loin, gumbo, baked macaroni and a chocolate praline cake.

"Last year, it snowed," Courtni remembered. "It was our first white Christmas."

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.