Lala’s Little Nugget: at this Austin dive bar, it’s been Christmas every day for more than 50 years!

Originally written by Leo S.🙏🏽 in 2020. Updated and published in 2025’

In the Brentwood neighborhood of Austin, the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, there’s a jolly place where you can find the Christmas spirit every day, even in unbearably hot of a regular Texas summer.
Opened in 1972, dive bar Lala’s Little Nugget has been serving up cheap drinks and Yuletide cheer 365 days a year, with reindeer carting a sleigh up on the rooftop, ornaments, tinsel, and twinkling string lights adorn the walls, as well as a small faux evergreen sits in a corner next to a green velvet throne fit for jolly old Santa Claus.
They’re always there, even in the dead of summer.
The bar itself still feels like it’s stuck in the ’70s, with a Velvet Elvis painting that hangs near the entrance while, in the back, people play pool on an old table or look through songs on a jukebox that hasn’t been updated in decades.

It sounds good, but what’s the reason for the neverending Christmas?
There are rumors, theories and speculations about it, but actually it’s something of a mystery.
Some said the woman who once owned the bar was left by her husband on Christmas Eve, and so almost as a vengeance, she kept the bar and never changed the decor.
And others said that they’ve heard a tragic story about how the owner’s daughter died on Christmas or Christmas Eve, and he’s dealt with it by making the decor of the bar Christmas all year long.
There is also a Kenny Chesney song called “Jesus and Elvis”, with its lyrics were supposedly inspired by this story.
Apparently the song was originally written by Texas musician Hayes Carll, who used to spend a lot of time at Lala’s and, in a video, he says he was curious about the story behind the Christmas decor so he started asking around.
It was that Lala had a son who had gone off to fight in Vietnam at Christmas time, and she promised she wouldn’t take the lights down until he made it back home.
All these years later those lights are still hanging up there.
More simply, most practical people said she just liked Christmas decorations.

So, let’s review: an ex-husband. A tragic death. A son killed at war. Or just a mere love of Christmas.

In any case, what we do know is that Frances Lala owned and ran the bar from its opening until her retirement in 2015, with long-time regulars said you could almost always find her behind the bar and that she loved a tall tale.
She died two years later, thus the truth behind her everlasting holiday decor remains a tightly guarded secret.
Locals said of the reasons that she created Lala’s was because she wanted a place where women could feel safe to drink alone, creating, in modern parlance, a safe space to do that.
Typically, it was just Frances and her business partner, Sara Santos, behind the bar making drinks.
Frances was also a private person. She didn’t share a lot about her family or her background.
There she was behind that bar for more than 35 years, and apparently nobody knew anything about her.

These days, Lala’s is owned by a company called FBR Management, which runs about a dozen bars in Austin. It took over Lala’s when the original owner retired.
Whatever you want to believe in, the story behind Lala’s Christmas decor is whatever you need it to be.
A little bit like Santa, it’s up to you, open for interpretation!

Images from web – Google Research