Mardi Gras is not just in New Orleans — there are other places that throw big parties too (2024)

Mardi Gras, arriving Tuesday, Feb. 13 this year, is the mother of all celebrations.

What you might not know is that it has brothers, cousins, nieces and nephews.

Junkanoo in the Bahamas. La Diablada in Bolivia. Fastelavn in Denmark and Norway. Apókries in Greece. Shrovetide in Russia. And in many places, including Trinidad, Rio de Janeiro, and sometimes in New Orleans itself, it is known by the all-encompassing name "Carnival."

"The Christian calendar always had carnival," said Carl Mack, founder of the Mardi Gras Museum of Costumes and Culture in New Orleans.

In fact, the northeast U.S., where we live, is one of the few places in the world that doesn't have a carnival tradition — though with the popularity of New Orleans food and music, many restaurants and clubs in our area do have their own Mardi Gras events this time of year.

They'll serve King Cakes, stage costume contests, crown a king and queen of carnival, host zydeco bands that throw out beads to the raucous crowds.

But it's Catholic countries — and majority-Catholic regions like Louisiana — where the carnival tradition is strongest. In New Orleans, it's a whole season, that lasts from Epiphany — Jan. 6 — to Fat Tuesday, the day before Lent.

"It's a huge celebration," Mack said. "For weeks, there are things to do every day."

"Carnival" means "farewell to meat." And in the beginning, that's literally what it was — a blowout feast, in which all the stores of meat would be eaten in advance of Lent, rather than being left to spoil during the month of abstinence. "Fat Tuesday" — Mardi Gras — was the last and lustiest day of excess before Ash Wednesday, when it's time to pay the piper.

"They drank the wine and ate the meats and slaughtered the fatted calf," he said. "After that, they woke up with a hangover and rubbed some ashes on their face and said they were going to abstain from meat during the spring."

But carnival also has its roots in pagan tradition. Specifically the Roman saturnalia — the time of topsy-turveydom. Masters and servants exchanged places. The sacred was mocked. Forbidden things were permitted.

And all in perfect freedom, because everyone wore masks — so no one knew who was who.

"The nobility wanted to sneak around and have fun like the peasants," Mack said. "Carnival is basically society upside-down. You have the nobility running around like a bunch of fools, and the fools running around like a bunch of nobility."

Those are the things that most carnivals have in common. But the specifics vary from country to country, culture to culture. For example...

New Orleans

Mardi Gras is the most famous of carnivals, if not the biggest. "80 percent of the population of New Orleans belongs to some kind of [Mardi Gras] club," he said.

Other parts of Louisiana celebrate Mardi Gras, as do other states — Mobile Alabama's is said to have preceded New Orleans — but it's The Big Easy that has the iconic features, the balls and the beads and the Mardi Gras Indians and the "krewes" (clubs). Especially, it has the parades. The first was in 1857.

"Floats are a big part of it here," he said. "There are a lot of people whose biggest thrill is riding on the floats and throwing beads."

Another unique characteristic of the New Orleans carnival is the music. It's a music city — the birthplace of jazz, the cradle rock-and-roll. The sounds of Mardi Gras, from "When the Saints Go Marching In" to Professor Longhair's "Go to the Mardi Gras" and The Meters' "Mardi Gras Mambo," and the wild handkerchief-waving, umbrella-twirling "second line" dancing that goes with them, are key ingredients.

"We have a lot of carnival music," Mack said. "You could listen for hours and never repeat."

Rio de Janeiro

When you think of Rio, you think of samba. And when you think of samba, you think of samba "schools" — those drumming, marching battalions with their distinctive tri-tone whistles and cuicas (a drum with a stick inside, rubbed back and forth) that are a distinctive feature of the Rio "Carnaval."

It's world's biggest such event — some 2 million people a day in the streets — and one of the best known. Not least because the popular 1959 film "Black Orpheus," with its iconic title tune, put it on everyone's radar.

Carnaval was brought to Brazil by the Portuguese colonizers in 1723. As with New Orleans Mardi Gras, it began as a fairly decorous celebration by the upper classes.

It became something much more lively — more raucous, more fun, more musically distinctive — when The People got involved. Their flamboyant feathers, elaborate makeup and catchy rhythms have made Rio's carnival a magnet for tourists.

"You had this European holiday being celebrated, but what was the indigenous population and the African population going to do at this time?" Mack said. "So they developed their own way of celebrating, and used their own music."

Trinidad

On Trinidad, the U.S. Navy had a base. And that base went through a lot of 55-gallon steel oil drums.

It was a certainEllie Mannette, in the 1930s, who was said to have taken one of these discarded oil barrels and fashioned the first modern steel drum.

By the 1950s and '60s, steel pan orchestras of 100 or more were competing for first first prize at the annual carnival parades. As samba is to Rio's carnaval, and jazz and funk is to the New Orleans Mardi Gras, so steel band music is the heart and soul of Trinidad's celebration. Colorful costumes, giant puppets, stilt walkers are also part of the fun. But it's the music that propels it all.

Back in the day, steel bands were named after the American war movies that were then the rage inTrinidad— The Invaders, The Renegades, Casablanca, Crossfire. And they had war-like tendencies to match. Rivals clashed.

Recalled one veteran: "The first sign there was gonna be trouble was when the music stopped."

Venice

Mardi Gras may be the most famous of these events. But the Venice carnival, first celebrated in 1162, is the most iconic.

Drunken revelers in harlequin costumes, carrying flambeaux as they scramble across the Rialto bridge, have figured in paintings, stories, movies for centuries. Officially banned in 1797, carnival persisted as a underground tradition for more than a century, and was finally reinstated in 1979.

The Venice carnival was an inspiration for Mendelssohn's "Italian" symphony, and for Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amondillado," which takes place during "the supreme madness of the carnival season." Remember Fortunato — lured by Poe's vengeful narrator to a distant catacomb where he is walled up alive? Adding to the grotesque irony, he is wearing the classic carnival costume: "parti-striped dress," with "conical cap and bells."

It is from Venice that we get the carnival masks — originally made of porcelain or leather, and often associated with stock characters of the Italian "Commedia dell'arte": Columbina, Pantalone, the Arlecchinoor "harlequin," and the Plague Doctor with his long beak.

These are the established "characters" of the Venice carnival — and one way it differs from the New Orleans Mardi Gras, where revelers are more or less free to go where their fancy takes them.

"In Venice they might pick which characters they want to be, but they don't do the kind of costumes we do," Mack said.

Russia

One of the world's most popular ballets is "Petrushka," by Igor Stravinsky.

It's the story of a marionette who is brought to life, and his pathetic love for a fellow marionette who has — shall we say — strings attached.

Key to the story is the settling — the Shrove-Tide fair in 1830s St. Petersburg, also known as Maslenitsa or "pancake week." Which is to say, carnival.

The puppet theater, where a magician brings the unhappy Petrushka to life, is just one of the many attractions. In Stravinsky's 1911 ballet, there are also gypsies, dancing bears, merry-go-rounds and masquers pounding the pavement to an accordion tune.

What there are not are pancakes, or blini — in Russia, the hallmark of the holiday.

Perhaps it's just hard to show a pancake dancing.