When those people who think they know everything – New York editors – asked George Rodrigue to come up with a Cajun Christmas storybook, he knew what they envisioned. "They had some idea of Santie Claus being pulled in a sleigh by eight alligators," says Rodrigue, creator and owner of the ubiquitous Blue Dog. The New York editors were hoping for a jolly stroll through Cajun land as seen through the eyes of one of its most famous sons. They had asked Rodrigue to tell the story of the Christmas traditions specific to the Cajun culture that he remembered from his childhood.

  "But there are no Christmas traditions that are purely Cajun," says Rodrigue. Part of the problem, he adds, is that, "When I was growing up in New Iberia, we didn’t know we were Cajuns. We were just kids in the ’50s, running around. We were juvenile delinquents. We didn’t call ourselves ‘Cajuns.’ The word didn’t exist."

  The word didn’t exist yet because it didn’t need to. Forty or 50 years ago, Rodrigue and everyone else living along the Bayou Teche were just going about their business, unaware that one day their way of life would be identified by this term – Cajun – and with that term would come a strange new self-consciousness. It would become something that New York editors would view as interesting, quaint, unlike the rest of the country. What had been simply his life would eventually acquire quotation marks, becoming a "culture." More importantly, it would become a "dying culture."

  "Yes, the Cajun culture is dead," Rodrigue says. "You know it’s dead when you have to hold festivals to preserve it." He recalls the Saturday nights of his childhood when he could hear the pigs being slaughtered on the other side of the railroad tracks. Nobody came to watch; it wasn’t a performance. It was what people in his town did to prepare for the Sunday dinner. "Now, you go to a festival and see it done in a ‘Butcherie.’"

  The imminent death of Cajun culture may be precisely the reason it has become this commodity, packaged and presented, veering close to cliche. According to his reading of a study sponsored by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, Rodrigue points out that throughout history, just before a culture dies, it erupts. And he believes that the Cajun way of life has erupted into prominence, bringing the food and the music of that region to the rest of the world, because it is on the way out. He compares it to the American western frontier. Just as that way of life was dying, the icon of the lonely cowboy began appearing in art and popular culture. "You get a sense of it dying," he says. "Then it erupts, and then it goes away and then reinvents itself in a new way."

Rodrigue’s recent contribution to the

eruption of Cajun culture is A Blue Dog Christmas. The storybook is the latest addition to the widespread Blue Dog phenomenon that includes the artist’s two galleries – one in Carmel, Calif., the other in the French Quarter – where his Blue Dog paintings have been known to move out the door with a $250,000 price tag. There has been his book Blue Dog Man, the series of Absolut Vodka ads, three Jazz Fest posters, as well as countless private commissions for such persons as Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Brokaw and President Clinton. Rodrigue has also negotiated a deal with Xerox to make Blue Dog the centerpiece of a $200 million ad campaign to launch its newest inkjet printer. In the offing will be a cookbook tied to Rodrigue’s restaurant in Lafayette, Blue Dog Cafe, plus a children’s book tentatively titled My Blue Dog is Yellow and a book by his wife, Wendy Rodrigue, named Blue Dog Family. In the year 2003 his publisher, Stewart Tabori and Chang, plans a 400-page retrospective of 500 paintings showing the evolution of Blue Dog over the past 15 years. You know you’re really onto something when they start doing retrospectives.

  The Christmas book is a much slimmer volume, although not necessarily lighter in content. Blue Dogs abound. Despite the sense of being overwhelmed by Blue Dogness, this book does offer a sweet reverie on Christmas in Louisiana without screaming "Cajun." The work Rodrigue eventually sent to the New York editors consisted of 19 silkscreens done over the course of three years, each depicting his signature Blue Dog in various Christmasy scenes. These are accompanied by text, which is Rodrigue’s memoir of how he celebrated the holiday in New Iberia. Not a single alligator in the book. Although it was not what the editors expected, Rodrigue reports that they were perfectly happy with it.

  The book is populated by other animals – a couple of dogs. In addition to the Blue Dog are Rodrigue’s boyhood pets, Lady and Trixie, who along with their famous blue cousin, he identifies as the symbol of unconditional love. More than reindeer, Rodrigue writes, it is the ineffable spirit of dogs that comes to his mind when he thinks of Christmas. As featured characters in this memoir of a 1950s Christmas in New Iberia, Rodrigue writes that Lady and Trixie frequently endured wearing cardboard antlers. The story revolves around the intersection of this holiday and his early development as an artist. "I celebrated Christmas by making things with my own hands," says Rodrigue, referring to the true-to-scale Nativity scene he had constructed on his parents’ front lawn. "Lady and Trixie slept in the manger with Jesus."

  The text of Rodrigue’s book is a fairly simple and fond look back at the artist’s holiday celebrations. Some of the most interesting moments of the story show up in the captions for the illustrations. For example, we learn that his mother had worn a full set of false teeth since she was 16, when a dentist pulled all of her real teeth for reasons not explained in this book. In another caption Rodrigue describes the "snowman" he and his friends made from packed mud, which they left overnight in the desperate hope that by morning it would be covered in frost and maybe for a little while look real. He also relates the story of the one and only snowstorm he could ever remember falling on his town. The stuff stayed on the ground long enough for him to play in it with his dogs – a rare and wonderful Christmas gift.

Although the model for the Blue Dog – the much mythologized Tiffany, Rodrigue’s studio companion who started the whole Blue Dog tidal wave – did not exist in Rodrigue’s childhood, she does appear throughout this book. The question is, why? What is she doing there? What does the Blue Dog mean in this context? These are just a few of the many questions that art critics have asked in general about the Blue Dog, not the least of which is why someone would pay $250,000 for one.

  Rodrigue is untroubled by what the critics say of his work – that it is "badly painted" and "lowbrow" – because he doesn’t have to be troubled by it. The fact is that when so many people want to pay so much money for your work, it doesn’t matter what the art critics say.

  It does matter, however, what the judges say. Rodrigue has recently been in the news because his ex-wife, Veronica Rodrigue, has filed suit claiming the Blue Dog image constitutes community property, and therefore she is entitled to half of what Rodrigue has earned from Blue Dog during and after their marriage, which ended in 1994. The suit presents an interesting dilemma for the judges who now have to do what art critics normally do, which is make a determination if the Blue Dog is (as George Rodrigue claims) a work of art that exists in a unique state from painting to painting, and therefore not subject to community property laws. Or is it a copyrighted image (as Veronica Rodrigue claims) that has been franchised into a going concern, which would constitute community property?

  As it stands now, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a lower court ruling that favored George Rodrigue. The three-judge panel has remanded the case back to the lower court with instructions to the judge to reconsider that each Blue Dog painting is a derivative of the original image. In this view, Blue Dog would be considered similar to Mickey Mouse or Snoopy, and therefore community property.

  The question of whether the Blue Dog continues to be unique or if it has become a manufactured commodity must bedevil Rodrigue as an academically trained artist. But it also must bedevil him as a man trying to hold onto his money. The fact that there are now Blue Dog notecards, a Blue Dog desk calendar and a Blue Dog Café does not strengthen his fine art claim. In his negotiations with Xerox, Rodrigue insisted that the Blue Dog would not become animated. The advertising people at first wanted to liberate the Blue Dog from the canvas so it could move around and point at the new inkjet printer. But Rodrigue would not agree to the deal until he had acquired creative control over how Blue Dog appears in the ads. He has made seven Blue Dog paintings for the Xerox ads, so Blue Dog will always appear in the same way as it does in Rodrigue’s galleries. As an artist, Rodrigue maintains he does not want his Blue Dog to stray from his original vision. But it is also true that in order to hold his claim in court, Rodrigue has to make sure that the Blue Dog does not begin to act like Mickey Mouse or Snoopy.

  So everybody wants a piece of Blue Dog. This is not surprising, considering the huge income at stake. (Blue Dogness has saturated so deeply into popular culture, it has even inspired an amusing mock-off called Red Cat.) And yet the impact of Blue Dog still defies any easy explanation. This odd little canine who rose from the misty swamps of the artist’s imagination has gone far beyond what his creator ever anticipated, and even Rodrigue has a hard time explaining it himself. He doesn’t claim to know where it came from or where it’s going. He does have an answer for why Blue Dog appears in his childhood memoir.

  "Blue Dog is me," says Rodrigue.

  Without intentionally echoing Flaubert’s pronouncement, "Emma Bovary, c’est moi," Rodrigue expresses the experience that an artist can have of becoming merged with his creation. "And Blue Dog has taken my life over. I could never have done this myself."

  Blue Dog came into existence in 1984 as an illustration Rodrigue did for a story about the monstrous ghost dog of Cajun folk tales called the Loup Garou or Werewolf. He had modeled the illustration of the Loup Garou on his long-dead spaniel mutt, Tiffany. As this image of the blue dog got a much stronger reaction than he had imagined possible, he changed the blue dog into Blue Dog. And the image began to take on a life of its own, traveling all over the world through Rodrigue’s paintings. Now Rodrigue says Blue Dog has evolved again to the point where "Blue Dog is me, going through life commenting on society. I’m not painting dogs."

  In describing the essence of Blue Dogness, Rodrigue says that it’s important that the image remain the same in every painting. No matter what else is in the painting or whatever surrounds the Blue Dog, the Blue Dog always looks back at the viewer with the same direct, unmoving posture and gaze. She is always on the same level as the viewer, thus challenging the human’s presumption of superiority over animals. This challenge initiates an open-ended discussion of the art’s intention that is largely fueled by the complete absence of hints from the artist about what the dog is doing there.

  "When you see that you begin to ask questions," Rodrigue says. "I’ve re-directed the dog into something else. By not making it move, people begin to ask, ‘Why?’ It is the same, yet it is not the same. The dog is a dog, yet it is blue. Blue Dog poses questions about reality and life that you also ask about yourself. ‘Why am I here? What am I doing? Where am I going? Why do I look this way?’ As soon as you begin asking questions of a painting, you are looking for answers. And that is the beginning of a connection to the painting." .