Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras, or French for fat Tuesday, are the last day before the ritual lent, which is performed by Christians. This holiday is in remembrance of the forty days that Jesus spent living in a desert.

The date of Mardi Gras depends on Easter. It is celebrated in many Roman Catholic countries and other communities. Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras is a term that ma have risen in part from the custom of parading a fat ox through French towns and villages on Shrove Tuesday (Fat Tuesday).

The Pope Gregory XIII made Mardi Gras an official religious holiday in 1582. Much of the first part of the carnival is invitation only coronation balls and super dances. The public part of the festival doesn't start until the balls and dances hit the streets. A couple of weeks before Mardi Gras are when the public part of the festival starts. Metropolitan New Orleans has more then seventy parades just in those two weeks.

North Americas first Mardi Gras was on march 3, 1699, when explorers eventually found the end of the Mississippi River. They made camp a few miles up river, named the spot Point d' Mardi Gras and through a spontaneous party.

Mardi Gras parades officially began in 1838. Over the next twenty years carnival became an increasingly rowdy event defined by drunkenness and violence. Eventually churches and the press began to call for its demise. In 1857, Mardi Gras was on the verge of death. Comus saved Mardi Gras though. Then new trouble started brewing in the city by 1872. As a diversion they invited the Grand Duke Alexis Romanoff Alexandrovitch. He accepted the city's invite.

A new krewe was created of citizens who would choose a king of all the carnival. The group would be called the School of Design and its ruler was to be Rex (Latin for king). The duke would soon become king of the carnival.

The oldest parading African American krewe is the Zulu, Social Aid, and Pleasure Club. These krewes took to the streets in 1909. By the 1950s, truck parades, composed of floats built atop flatbed trucks usually by families, had become well established.

Carnivals faced new challenges in the later half of the 20th century. A 1979 police strike caused parades to be canceled in the city, but a number of them moved to the suburbs.

In 2002, Mardi Gras was celebrated under the shadow of the 9/11 terror attacks. Because Super Bowl that year was delayed, the two weekends of Mardi Gras parades were split.