Happy Lundi Gras

Today is Lundi Gras (Fat Monday) - the day before Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), and two days before Ash Wednesday, the somber beginning of the penitential season of Lent.

Before the days of refrigeration, people had to use up all their fatty foods, like cream and meat, before Ash Wednesday - or else it would go bad and go to waste. So, Carnival (Latin: Carni vale, "farewell to meat") began as a pre-Lent last gasp of feast before the fast.

I think we in Louisiana have it just right.

Carnival, for us, involves family celebrations of parades, food, music, and fun. Salem Lutheran Church is having a Mardi Gras party tomorrow, as two krewes (private parade organizations) will parade right past our church. There will be marching bands, high steppers, jazz music, colorful floats with costumed and masked riders tossing out beads, stuffed animals, toys, candy, doubloons (colorful "coins"), plastic cups, and other "treasures." There will be families out and about with children running to and fro, laden with toys and beads.

To many outsiders, the image of New Orleans Carnival is not this local family celebration, but rather a more trashy display of reveling tourists on Bourbon Street. As one of my parishioners put it, some (certainly not all) tourists come from somewhere else, behave shamefully, and then go back home - leaving their reputation behind. But the reality is this: the tableau of drunken people exposing themselves can indeed be found, but it is confined to Bourbon Street, and once again, is really a tourist phenomenon. My aforementioned parishioner grew up in the French Quarter, and until recent years, even the Quarter's version of Carnival was squeaky clean family fun - as it still is in most of New Orleans and its environs.

But there does seem to be an "attitude of latitude" involved in Carnival. There is indeed a relativity to the intensity of the revelry in proportion to one's distance from the tropics.

While New Orleans Carnival seems exotic, if not downright decadent and weird, to our neighbors in the North, we're really pretty tame compared to Carnival near the equator, as in, say, Brazil - where samba teams compete with one another riding gargantuan floats, with riders decked out in a combination of elaborate feather costumes and full nudity. Actually, that's an exaggeration (let's be fair here). Carnival rules ban nudity, so the samba girls must at least wear a piece of tape. Last year, one of the contestants drew a penalty for losing her four-inch long, inch-and-a-half wide piece of tape. Oops! Not that the tape, or lack thereof, can really be seen from a distance anyway. This year, she apparently added body paintings of the President of the United States and of the President of Brazil in addition to her piece of tape - perhaps reflecting a more conservative trend in Sao Paulo's Carnival.

So you see, we're not really that crazy after all. Brazil's Carnival is way more wild than New Orleans's.

But by contrast, many churches in the Northern U.S. do mark the Mardi Gras with a Carnival of their own: a pancake breakfast on "Shrove Tuesday." That's it. A pancake breakfast (which would be what we in New Orleans would consider a Lenten meal - just kidding, but barely). Pancakes. Now, that's living on the edge. And I'm sure the really "wild and crazy" revelers liberally douse their flapjacks with a scandalous helping of maple syrup. Can you just stand the excitement?

I guess it's not a stretch to surmise that if four inches of skin is covered in Brazil, then it is likely that four inches of skin is actually exposed in the land of the midnight sun (or in the winter, the land where the sun doesn't shine, pun intended). I guess there is some method to the madness.

We New Orleanians really do cut a Goldilocks and the Three Bears kind of via media between the extremes of naked girls and pancakes. Surely, there must be a happy medium! I think we do a good job of finding it here.

So, you Yankees, why not turn off that YouTube of the (almost) naked Brazilian girls while you eat your pancakes, and instead, why not come on down to da Big Easy next year for a real Mardi Gras, Dawlin? Forget the pancakes, have a po-boy, gumbo, jambalaya, oysters, crabs, crawfish, or maybe even some alligator or raccoon. Join us for parades, music, and lots of good clean fun.

And leave that parka behind.

But if you really must go to Bourbon Street, make sure you wear a Michigan or Ohio State shirt while you're doing things you just wouldn't do in Lansing or Youngstown. Don't make us look bad, y'all. Either way, just make sure you spend lots of money. Hurricane Season is only four months away, and we got levees to build.

Meanwhile, Happy Carnival, and laissez les bons temps rouler!