COTEAU — After Saturday’s full-out party to celebrate the Lao New Year, the calm of Sunday was a welcome respite.

People were still visiting the Wat Thammarattanaram Temple, enjoying the grilled chicken on a stick, sugar cane drinks and music under the compound’s pavilion. But others were taking the opportunity to pay their respects to the temple’s monks, plant mementos to remember loved ones and share in the peaceful reflection of a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

“We have a unique position here,” said Phanat Xanamane, one of the organizers of this year’s Louisiana Lao New Year Festival. “We can present the cultural aspect in a way that doesn’t get lost the way it does in the bigger cities. I’m very proud and happy at the feedback I have received after this year’s festival.”

Some of the visitors for this year’s gathering came from those larger areas. Xanamane said he talked with people from as far away as Montreal, Canada, and Seattle as he made his way through the crowd over the last four days.

“I was here 20 years ago the first time,” said Thip Harsana, who came to this year’s festival from Fort Smith, Arkansas, with her family. “I came down that year because of a rave that was going on, and now I am back with my family in tow.”

This year’s festival was marketed in a way that had never been tried before. In addition to a full-court press with local media, the festival had its first major-dollar sponsors as well as its first opening night gala at Cypress Bayou Casino. It also initiated VIP access and an information booth to help the uninitiated navigate the ins and outs of the Buddhist principles and etiquette at the core of the temple.

“I think this year has been a tremendous success,” said Kim Limkeo, co-chairman for this year’s organizing board. “Everything went very well.”

Xanamane, manning the info booth on Sunday afternoon, said that he estimated the temple saw from 3,000 to 3,500 visitors on Saturday alone.

“It is hard to put an accurate figure together,” he said. “But we sold 1,700 tickets for the Queen’s pageant on Friday night, and that would be only adults. There’s no way to really estimate how many people we saw on Saturday, especially since it is a festival crowd that tends to come and go.”

Another factor making an accurate headcount difficult is the ongoing street party that surrounds the temple during the festival. Even on the final day of the festival, floats from Saturday’s parade were still moving through the streets of Lanexang Village, music summoning dancers out onto the street from a dozen house parties and barbecues to continue the festivities.

Inside the temple walls, monks heard prayers from visitors and tied prayer bracelets, sprinkling those who approached with blessed water as they made donations to the temple. Outside the tent, music could be heard from the pavilion, accented with the laughter of children chasing each other with water guns and spraying streams of shaving cream.

“A lot of the people I talked with would like to see all of these things happen again,” Xanamane said. “At first, there was some hesitancy to change, to move things forward, but it is always that way the first time you try something new. The feedback has been very positive.”