It has been 6 months since we moved to Louisiana, to the heart of Cajun country, Lafayette. And while it has it’s subtle charms it will not replace my love for New Orleans. When weekends roll around we find every excuse to make our way to New Orleans-and there is always a good excuse. The latest being Mardi Gras. A time in New Orleans that is quite impossible to describe if you are not there to experience it.
Mardi Gras celebrations include parades, floats, colorful beads, king cakes, balls, drinks, crowds of spectators, music and endless celebrations. Each parade or Krewe has a name and a theme. Some are ‘super-krewes’ meaning that they have more impressive floats, more bands, more crowds and bigger ball celebrations.
For those of you who are not familiar with the celebrations here is a little history lesson: Mardi Gras, french for “Fat Tuesday” is the day before Ash Wednesday when Lent begins. It is the 5-8 week prior to Ash Wednesday when Christians traditionally were meant to eat as much food as they could in preparation for Lent. Now the eating has been replaced with drinking and celebrations. Mardi Gras or Carnival traditions in Louisiana followed the Creole French to New Orleans with the earliest ball dating back to the 1700’s. In the late 1850’s Americans who had long been left out of Creole’s Mardi Gras created their own club and called it the Mystick Krewe of Comus. And so the “krewes’ were born.
The royal colors of purple for justice, green for faith, and gold for power were adopted as the festival’s official colors, and more krewes arose, each throwing a lavish ball along with its parade and all with exclusive membership. These three colors now paint homes, streets, and even food during the month leading up to Mardi Gras, the most famous treat being the King Cake or the Galette des Rois.
This year I got to experience it all- from attending most of the parades to dressing up for my first ball. Arriving to a traffic ridden downtown we parked and headed to watch the parades on Saint Charles street in the Central Business District. After the parades we walked to the French Quarter to meet out of town friends who had come for Mardi Gras but barely left the Quarter and Bourbon street (what a shame!). And so our night was spent on Bourbon with tourists and spring breaker college kids whose idea of Mardi Gras was a drunken spectacle of revealing breasts and throwing beads. Obnoxious and completely unauthentic.
The next day I was determined to head uptown to catch the parades since to me the most beautiful Mardi Gras experience is in Uptown surrounded by the large green oak trees and lines of tents, barbeques, drinks and djs. The neighboring college kids from Tulane and Loyola are a majority in uptown but it seems each block on Saint Charles is dedicated to a different crowd- from your mid 40’s with children tents to your college kids reunion- you can find it all.
The big parades of the weekend were Endymion and Orpheus leading up to the grand finale on ‘fat’ Tuesday. Given the amazing weather the streets were packed and there was barely any room to get to the front of the crowd to catch some beads. The large evening krewes end up either in the superdome or the convention center where people get dressed up to the nines carrying in their 6-packs and food trays in their ball gowns and tuxedos and proceed to get intoxicated while the floats drive around the stadium.
When I was first invited to the Endymion ball I envisioned a grandiose historical ball like those I’ve seen in the movies. Ball gowns and tuxedos and keeping traditions alive I was sure there would be organized dancing a la Francaise and Anglaise. My first clue that I would be in for a surprise was the location of the ball: the superdome. And what the ball turned out to be was a big ‘dirty south’ style party. Sure the crowds were dressed up but it was a contrast to them carrying their alcohol and buckets of fried chicken and veggies in hand. And while it was a good time I wouldnt necessarily define it as a ‘ball’.
And when all the fun and games are over, the streets are piled with mounds of garbage, beads and other Mardi Gras leftovers which are left to the city to clean. All this is done after each parade making the streets ready for the next one. And there you have it, a brief look into my Mardi Gras experience.
