It probably won't utterly shock you to hear that Mardi Gras isn't a big holiday in Eagar, AZ. For whatever reason, remote, conservative, non-Catholic hick towns in the desert southwest just don't pay much attention to it -- neither its pre-Lent date on the calendar nor its rich Creole cultural nuances. Especially not its strippin/drinkin/flashin revelry. It was kind of a non-existent holiday there. Thus, now that I live in St Louis, home of the second biggest Mardi Gras celebration in the US after New Orleans, it's essentially like discovering a whole new holiday that never existed for me before.
I didn't participate at all in the strippin/drinkin/flashin aspects of the holiday, but somehow there's been a trickle-down effect of Mardi Gras into my daily life anyway. So what does Mardi Gras seem like to a novice outsider like me? It boils down to three questions:
- First: Why is that girl drunk at 10 o'clock in the morning and wandering through my neighborhood wearing metallic turquoise spandex and cheap necklaces?
Answer: Because that's what people do on Mardi Gras.
- Second: What does Mardi Gras mean, anyway?Answer: Fat Tuesday. As the day before Ash Wednesday, which kicks off the Lent fasting season, it's the last chance to eat, drink, and indulge before all the confessing and abstaining begins. The idea of racking up extra sins to confess and extra addictions to then abstain from doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't think the drunken spandex necklace girl would've appreciated that logic, though.
- Third and most important: Is there supposed to be a tiny naked plastic baby in this cake?
Answer: Apparently yes. Ignorant to this potential food hazard, I unwittingly bit into that tiny naked plastic baby as I was foraging bites from a random left-over cake in the residents' lounge at work this morning. According to Mardi Gras custom, that either means that I will be Queen for the day, or have a baby soon, or make tamales for everyone, or bring bagels to share next Thursday. Strange predictions. Strange holiday. But even stranger still: the fact that someone baked a tiny naked plastic baby into a cake. An intervention may be in order.
About the second question:
ReplyDeleteThe Lenten season is long. If you haven't racked up enough sins prior to it, you run out of things to confess/avoid during it. That makes for a very boring Lent.