Mardi Gras

However, while the holiday is supposed to be confined to those three days only, in practice (and especially in the New World) Mardi Gras is generally celebrated for a full week before Lent and marked by spectacular parades featuring floats, pageants, elaborate costumes, masked balls, and dancing in the streets. During Mardi Gras people line the streets of New Orleans (and other cities) to beg for plastic doubloons and cheap beaded necklaces that for a few days are as precious as gold. It is a time when people can do things that they would never otherwise even want to do, and do them with people with whom they would not otherwise even think of associating themselves.

Mardi Gras originated as one of the series of carnival days held in all Roman Catholic countries between Twelfth Night (or Epiphany) and Ash Wednesday. These carnivals had their origins in pre-Christian spring fertility rites but are also based in another, more general ancient tradition, that of the

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was fading, the New Orleans Mardi Gras (along with that in Mobile, Alabama) were acquiring "the institutional frame and popular support that still sustain them" (Kinser,1990, p. 9). The first carnival in New Orleans that is documented in writing (although the reliability of this text is somewhat questionable) took place in 1705 when soldiers and settlers at Fort Louis de la Louisiane celebrated the day with dancing, eating, drinking, singing and some masking and costuming. The celebration may not only have marked a day in the Roman Catholic festival cycle but also relief at having just survived a yellow-fever epidemic (Kinser, 1990, p. 19). Celebration of the holiday over the next half-century was sporadic, reflecting shifts in the political status of the province within globally shifting patterns of colonialism and the difficulties of life in the region in the 18th century. But by the 1780s it was firmly established as a holiday (Kinser, 1990, p. 21). Although certainly there were French antecedents to the Mardi Gras of New Orleans, it was in fact formed through the amalgamation of a number of very different elements: It stands as an nearly perfect example of a syncretic holiday. Kinser (1990) lists five separate elements
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Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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