Shrove Tuesday
The last day before the beginning of Lent on the Gulf Coast that once belonged to France, it is Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”: Laissez les bon temps rouler!
It was first celebrated in Mobile, Alabama, but the big show these days is in New Orleans, and it is a holiday in the state of Louisiana, because people wouldn’t show up for work anyway, so why fight it.
The tradition is to serve King cake, which is a circle of cinnamon bun dough with a white frosting on top sprinkled with sugar colored purple, gold, and green. If that weren’t bad enough, they put the figurine of a baby in the dough, and whoever finds it in their piece is supposed to be lucky. Actually if you find it and don’t choke on it, I guess you are lucky. You should use a small ceramic figurine, as some of the cheap plastic versions melt in the oven [yummy].
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Sometimes being the one to get the baby ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Especially with the ceramic ones. I’ve been where several have had to have dental work afterwards. Used to live in the area of New Orleans.
People get crazy setting up their places for the parade routes long before the parade is scheduled, sometimes as much as several days before. They are all in the rush to be the one to holler, “throw me something mister”. They’ve quit with the coconuts after a few of the bystanders got whonked good when they weren’t looking.
If they used gold, it would significantly reduce the dental damage, but the original purpose of putting objects in cakes or puddings was to select a sacrificial victim for various and sundry religious rites that no one wants to talk about these days. Whether it was a sacrifice for the sum to return in the winter, or for crop fertility in the spring, it always meant that someone had to be sacrificed.
I watched a couple of parades in different locations and never really understood what the point was. I had no interest in what was being thrown, so it didn’t make much sense to me as anything other than a local custom that people followed because it was ‘traditional’. Apparently some people think it is ‘fun’. I guess I’m just not a ‘fun person’.
As odd as all the above sounds, I tended to stay away from the parades. They don’t mention the little things that happen there nationally since it isn’t good for business.
Like random strangers getting shot or Marti Gras being the unofficial pick pocket holiday or how many cars get broken into while the parades are going on. Mugging ranks right up there too.
They’ve long had a problem with people shooting guns and pistols into the air to celebrate. Of course every year someone happens to be standing in the wrong place at the right time when those bullets come down.
It’s amazing the number of people down here who believe that gravity takes the day off when they celebrate, so those rounds they fire will continue right off the planet.
I was assigned for security at too many large events to ever what to attend one without being armed in uniform and getting paid time-and-a-half.