Mardi Gras / Fat Tuesday

For 14 centuries the season of Lent has been a time for self-examination and penitence in preparation for Easter.  When public penitents came to the church for forgiveness, the priest would take some ash (made by burning the palms used on Palm Sunday of the previous year) and mark their foreheads with the sign of the cross as a reminder that they were but ashes and dust.  The period lasts for two lunar months through Easter of the year. 

So, for centuries, the first day of Lent was marked by a pre-Lent period of revelry, usually commencing on the last day of Christmas season and gaining traction as the faithful knew that "Fat Tuesday" would mark the last day of enjoyment of pleasures of the body.  The first day of Carnival (the celebratory lunar cycle) varies with both national and local traditions. Thus, in Munich in Bavaria the Carnival season, there called Fasching, begins on the feast of the Epiphany (January 6), while in Cologne in the Rhineland it begins on November 11 at 11:11 am (11th month, day, hour, and minute). In France the celebration is restricted to Shrove Tuesday (the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday) and to mi-carème (the Thursday of the third week of Lent). More generally, the commencement date is Quinquagesima Sunday (the Sunday before Ash Wednesday), and the termination is Shrove Tuesday. 

In the United States, New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama became epicenters for Mardi Gras celebrations.

In 1872, the Krewe of Rex initiated the Mardi Gras colors of purple (for justice), gold (for power), and green (for faith). These were the family colors of visiting Russian Grand Duke Alexis Romanoff, whose favorite song, “If Ever I Cease to Love,” also became the official anthem of the New Orleans Mardi Gras.   Carnival unleashed the urban tensions between these ethnic and religious groups through clouds of flour. A visitor from Britain described the Mardi Gras of 1846, saying, "There was a grand procession parading the streets, almost every one dressed in the most grotesque attire, troops of them on horseback, some in open carriages, with bands of music, and in a variety of costumes... All wore masks, and here and there in the crowd, or stationed in a balcony above, we saw persons armed with bags of flour, which they showered down copiously on any one who seemed particularly proud of his attire." A local told the Brit that Mardi Gras meant "flour and fun." Some scholars have viewed the raucous dusting as a remnant from Roman festivals, in which flour symbolized fertility. In New Orleans, it was a commodity symbolic of the agricultural riches that flowed down the Mississippi River to the city's docks.

Communities in New Orleans, of both sacred and secular identity, employ images of Native Americans as icons of spiritual power and presence. Acting as an instance of co-narration,  clergy and congregants of Spiritualist/Spiritual churches - whose narratives of the Indian spirits find expression through interlacing oral and ritual performances - have helped to establish a sacred dimension for Indian processions in New Orleans, adding an overtly spiritual note to otherwise secular 'rites of territory repossessed'. Through community response to the death of Big Chief Allison 'Tootie' Montana, and the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras in 2006, Indian icons and imagery still stand for many New Orleanians as powerful signs of something in the soul that, to paraphrase a popular Mardi Gras Indian song, won't kneel and won't bow down. 

Mardi Gras arrived with French settlers to New Orleans in 1703, but in Mobile they like to start the story with Michael Krafft, a one-eyed cotton broker who got drunk with friends on New Year's Eve in 1830 and raided Partridge Hardware Store, seizing hoes and forks and marauding through the streets to the mayor's house, where he was invited in for breakfast. Krafft formed the first society--or "mystic order" --to lead a parade around the city. Other cotton workers set up a rival group. Then more emerged, tied up with the city's businesses, with names like medieval guilds: the Knights of Revelry, the Maids of Mirth.

Where you celebrate, how you celebrate -- it's all a party during Mardi Gras!