First Free Sunday
LSU Museum of Art
Baton Rouge
Dec. 7, 2025
Santa, Christmas ornament decoration stations and a giant community gingerbread house were the draws to the LSU Museum of Art on First Free Sunday yesterday.
First Free Sunday is a monthly event in Baton Rouge when museums, local landmarks and cultural institutions are free and open to the public between 1 and 4 p.m. Venues also host special events or small concerts. The LSU Museum of Art has fairly cheap admission fees ($5 for adults but free for kids under 12, LSU affiliates and military personnel), but First Free Sunday brought in so many families with young kids.
I’ve been to LSU MOA for various events and exhibits, but there was new life injected into the space with so many little kids running around. The line to meet Santa was out the door. The downstairs lobby area had many tables for decorating mini canvas ornaments.
I wish that more of the families downstairs would make their way up, but I get it. The museum is there all the time; Santa isn’t. To the museum’s credit, they strategically placed the community gingerbread house activity upstairs to bring people into the galleries.
The community gingerbread house is a giant cardboard box with a roof lined with white paper plate shingles. Kids drew directly on it, pasted bows, stickers and other decor and otherwise made the house their own.
“There’s a lot of 6-7 on here,” one museum volunteer commented to me.
And there is. Some of the sixes and sevens are backwards, but it’s an undeniable motif. The community gingerbread house represents the point of an event like First Free Sunday. It’s an accessible draw which creates a way for kids to start making memories inside of the museum, and hopefully, it’ll be displayed somewhere.
Walking through the galleries is a surprisingly peaceful experience compared to the chaos of the festivities downstairs in the lobby. A few families walk through the gallery occasionally pointing out different paintings or sculptures, but it’s mostly quiet. Only a subset of the kids from downstairs come upstairs to see the art, but I find that the presence of kids makes me see the art in their permanent collection anew. This piece would be so big if I was only two or three feet off the ground. Was that guy always missing a head?
The experience reminded me of the events like this that I grew up attending when I was a kid. My favorite part of the art museum in my hometown was the kids’ activities room where I got to make crafts. But the existence of that room made me want to go to the museum again and again, and eventually, that led to a love for art.
First Free Sunday lowers barriers to cultural institutions and creates space for young people to connect with the spaces. This is some of the most important outreach that a museum can do. It might start with a 6-7 gingerbread house, but it won’t end there.
