Modern day Mardi Gras

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Is any one else disgusted by the hordes of people who flood to New Orleans to “celebrate” Mardi Gras by throwing off their tops? When I was little, I didn’t even know Mardi Gras was part of the Lenten calendar; my family didn’t celebrate Fat Tuesday. I remember even then, being utterly confused about why people were gathering to literally parade around in celebration of sexual immorality.

What is more astounding to me now is how what to Catholics is the beginning of a period of fast and abstinence, a season of contemplation and sacrifice, has become a cacophony of seemingly blasphemous behavior that mocks the solemnity of Lent. :eek:

I feel sorry for the Louisiana Catholics who have had their cultural celebration turned into a Girls Gone Wild fest.
 
It’s not the beginning of the Lent as much as the end of the Carnival, although Wednesday 0:00 is Ash Wednesday starting.

The practice is wrong. The behaviour is disgusting, although the people are poor misguided creatures badly in need of proper catechesis or guidance.
 
The parades in New Orleans are really fine as long as one stays away from Bourbon Street and its immediate vicinity. There’s no indecency anywhere else. I attended many parades in Uptown (St Charles Ave), Metairie (Veterans Blvd), West Bank, Downtown on Canal St, Poydras St etc. Those are essentially family events, with kids of all ages attending and it’s safe to attend. Just stay away from Bourbon Street.
 
Not all Mardi Gras parades and parties are drunken, debauched, sex-fests. :rolleyes: There is a long and rich tradition of celebrating the Mardi Gras season in Louisiana as well as the Missisippi Gulf Coast. Mobile, Alabama also has a long tradition of Mardi Gras celebrations. As Joseph said, plenty of communities in and around the New Orleans area have “family friendly” Mardi Gras celebrations.

I am not a Cajun but I grew up in Mississippi right across the river, and I have great affection for their food and traditions. Unfortunately this particular tradition has been co-opted, much like St. Patrick’s Day, by people who are more interested in peddling booze and encouraging lewd behavior than preserving culture.

I ask people to please make an effort to distinguish Louisiana culture from the trash you might see on Bourbon St. and other assorted New Orleans tourist traps! I see nothing wrong with a pre-Lenten party filled with joyful celebration, as long as it is not done to excess.
 
I read a delightful article going on about the debauchery thrown about during Mardis Gras, and it said something quite interesting.

The Carnival, which often precedes Lent–Look at the word.

Carne vale. Farewell to the Flesh.

So the day of Mardis Gras oughtn’t to be one full of indulgence of the flesh and spiritual relaxation, rather, it ought to be one of spiritual exercise and preperation, that one could be better equipped to remain holy during Lent.
 
Joseph_L_Varga said:
The parades in New Orleans are really fine as long as one stays away from Bourbon Street and its immediate vicinity. There’s no indecency anywhere else. I attended many parades in Uptown (St Charles Ave), Metairie (Veterans Blvd), West Bank, Downtown on Canal St, Poydras St etc. Those are essentially family events, with kids of all ages attending and it’s safe to attend. Just stay away from Bourbon Street.
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I agree with your post. I am from South Louisiana. I actually don’t care for Mardi Gras, but the parades I have gone to are fine if you stay in an area that is family friendly. I used to go to the parades in Metairie with my grandfather when I was little and everyone acted decent. Now Bourbon Street I am sure is another story!

Kerri:)
 
ChristinaM said:
Not all Mardi Gras parades and parties are drunken, debauched, sex-fests. :rolleyes: There is a long and rich tradition of celebrating the Mardi Gras season in Louisiana as well as the Missisippi Gulf Coast. Mobile, Alabama also has a long tradition of Mardi Gras celebrations. As Joseph said, plenty of communities in and around the New Orleans area have “family friendly” Mardi Gras celebrations.

I am not a Cajun but I grew up in Mississippi right across the river, and I have great affection for their food and traditions. Unfortunately this particular tradition has been co-opted, much like St. Patrick’s Day, by people who are more interested in peddling booze and encouraging lewd behavior than preserving culture.

I ask people to please make an effort to distinguish Louisiana culture from the trash you might see on Bourbon St. and other assorted New Orleans tourist traps! I see nothing wrong with a pre-Lenten party filled with joyful celebration, as long as it is not done to excess.
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This is exactly what I find so sad: A wonderful day for families to celebrate culture and beliefs, and what people do on one block is the only story that defines the day. I’m no where near the South, and all we ever hear about here are the parties on Bourbon street. I’m glad to hear there are family celebrations that have survived the secularization. 👍
 
Mardi Gras was always a family celebration when I was a kid. The entire extended family would gather at my grandparent’s home in the Irish Channel and we would walk down to Third and St. Charles. We never saw the end of the truck parades because we kids were tired and hungry. It was back to granny’s for ham sandwiches and potato salad.

I worked at Walgreens at 900 Canal st before I went into the Navy in 1971. I saw two Mardi Gras standing on the roof of the building. In 1975 I went with friends into the Quarter. Wow. What feasts are served behind those gated patio doors. Yes, there were drag queens dressed in their finest but there was no debauchery. That was the first and last Mardi Gras I went to in the Quarter.

My sister and I did Mardi Gras with our families on Vets during the 80s and 90s - carrying on a family tradition.

The people I see on TV today are not native New Orleanians. It is people who think that is the way you are supposed to act. My technical school for the Navy was in NO and it was all those kids from the midwest who went down to Bourbon St with the same sad predictable results. As a native New Orleanian, I can count on less than the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been on Bourbon St and I’m 57. I believe that the folks who live in Las Vegas probably feel the same way about their city.

I went to high school in the French Quarter and roamed the antique shops on Royal St after semester exams. We stopped and said the Angelus because you could hear St. Augustine in the Treme’ and the bells of the Cathedral. I can tell you where to get a good poboy or a good bowl of gumbo. Girl’s gone wild is some midwesterner’s idea of a good time. New Orleanians know how to pass a good time without having to resort to being tawdry. Cafe au lait with beignets in the morning. A muffalotta at the Central Market at noon. A nice dinner at Tujage’s or the Gumbo Shop. All without absolutely any need of going to Bourbon St.

My sons are grown and have no interest in “doing Mardi Gras”. My niece is 20 and at Loyola and having a fine time catching the parades on St. Charles. My sister and I raised our children right - that is what most New Orleanians do and have done. All that sordid stuff…that isn’t native New Orleanians.
 
brotherhrolf said:
Mardi Gras was always a family celebration when I was a kid. The entire extended family would gather at my grandparent’s home in the Irish Channel and we would walk down to Third and St. Charles. We never saw the end of the truck parades because we kids were tired and hungry. It was back to granny’s for ham sandwiches and potato salad.

I worked at Walgreens at 900 Canal st before I went into the Navy in 1971. I saw two Mardi Gras standing on the roof of the building. In 1975 I went with friends into the Quarter. Wow. What feasts are served behind those gated patio doors. Yes, there were drag queens dressed in their finest but there was no debauchery. That was the first and last Mardi Gras I went to in the Quarter.

My sister and I did Mardi Gras with our families on Vets during the 80s and 90s - carrying on a family tradition.

The people I see on TV today are not native New Orleanians. It is people who think that is the way you are supposed to act. My technical school for the Navy was in NO and it was all those kids from the midwest who went down to Bourbon St with the same sad predictable results. As a native New Orleanian, I can count on less than the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been on Bourbon St and I’m 57. I believe that the folks who live in Las Vegas probably feel the same way about their city.

I went to high school in the French Quarter and roamed the antique shops on Royal St after semester exams. We stopped and said the Angelus because you could hear St. Augustine in the Treme’ and the bells of the Cathedral. I can tell you where to get a good poboy or a good bowl of gumbo. Girl’s gone wild is some midwesterner’s idea of a good time. New Orleanians know how to pass a good time without having to resort to being tawdry. Cafe au lait with beignets in the morning. A muffalotta at the Central Market at noon. A nice dinner at Tujage’s or the Gumbo Shop. All without absolutely any need of going to Bourbon St.

My sons are grown and have no interest in “doing Mardi Gras”. My niece is 20 and at Loyola and having a fine time catching the parades on St. Charles. My sister and I raised our children right - that is what most New Orleanians do and have done. All that sordid stuff…that isn’t native New Orleanians.
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Gosh, Brother Rolf, you really make me now miss New Orleans. And I wasn’t even born there. Just lived there for 10 yrs, until Katrina flushed me out.

Do you know
What it means
To miss New Orleans…

(and even when I went to the Preservation Hall on S. Peters St, to listen to some good jazz music, I would rather take Royal St than Bourbon St)
 
It’s not just jazz. It’s sitting out on the seawall and watching the sun set over Lake Pontchartrain. It’s riding the ferry back and forth at Canal St. It’s the banana man with his mule drawn wagon crying out “Bananas, I got bananas!” Or the Roman candy man or the snowball trucks in the summer.

Naw, everything is reduced to “Girls gone wild”. New Orleans is such an achingly Catholic city (people still make the sign of the cross on the bus when you pass in front of a church) and it gives my heart great joy that the Archdiocese after Katrina reinstated the Corpus Christi procession from Immaculate Conception (Jesuit’s) to the Cathedral. When I was a kid and up until the early 70s, the movie theaters shut down on Good Friday as well as the restaurants.

The New Orleans I know is not the New Orleans of those videos…not by a long shot…nor is Mardi Gras. I’d love to move back home to the Channel and reclaim my grandparent’s home. But I’d have to win the lottery first. 😃

I’m coming up on my high school’s 40th anniversary. I am a proud graduate of St. Aloysius. We just didn’t act like that. Mardi Gras today is not about native New Orleanians.
 
Here in Mobile (the home of the FIRST Mardi Gras in the U.S.!) it is still mostly a family celebration, with two weeks of parades, balls, etc. We’ve attracted a lot of people who used to go to New Orleans and got disgusted with the way it has evolved into something so wild.

We generally go to two balls, one very small one and one enormous, with thousands of people, four bands, etc. We used to go to as many as five or six, but my feet can’t take it anymore!

I stay away from our parades, too, and just enjoy a nice, quiet day at home; too much traffic and too many people downtown, and the Moon Pies they throw from the floats taste like wax anyway.
 
dixieagle said:
Here in Mobile (the home of the FIRST Mardi Gras in the U.S.!) it is still mostly a family celebration, with two weeks of parades, balls, etc. We’ve attracted a lot of people who used to go to New Orleans and got disgusted with the way it has evolved into something so wild.

We generally go to two balls, one very small one and one enormous, with thousands of people, four bands, etc. We used to go to as many as five or six, but my feet can’t take it anymore!

I stay away from our parades, too, and just enjoy a nice, quiet day at home; too much traffic and too many people downtown, and the Moon Pies they throw from the floats taste like wax anyway.
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Wow! Do people dress up in tuxes and ball gowns or are they masquerade balls? Sounds like fun 🙂
 
Ross09 said:
Wow! Do people dress up in tuxes and ball gowns or are they masquerade balls? Sounds like fun 🙂
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The members of the society are in costumes, as there are “tableaux” (goofy skits) presented, or, if it is a “parading society”, the members are in costumes related to the theme of their float or the parade in general (“Fairy Tales”, “Holidays”, “Great Romances” - you get the gist.) Honorary or Associate members are generally in tails and ballgowns (tuxes NOT allowed!) and some societies require that the associate members wear masks when on the dance floor. (These are called “mystic societies”, as opposed to “krewes” in New Orleans.) There is a group called the “Crewe of Columbus” here, which is a parading society and has many, many Catholic members. Guests at all the balls must wear white tie and tails or ball gowns.

There is an excellent documentary called “Order of Myths” which details Mardi Gras in Mobile and the fact that the mystic societies are still, largely, racially segregated, though there has been some movement away from that, from what I could tell at both of the balls we attended this year.
 
New Orleans is, of course, not just jazz. It’s also zydeco. 😉 And you can revel as much as you want on Mardi Gras day, but the cleaning crews move in right after midnight on Canal Street. Within a couple of hours the only thing that will still remind you of the Krewes that were rolling there, not long ago, will be the golden, purple and green beads that have gone astray and landed on the upper branches of trees and in similar places.

Thinking of Lent, some of the lenten foods of New Orleans are soo good, that’s already unfair. Think of seafood gumbo, oyster po-boys, fried alligator, catfish, and crawfish boiled with potatoes and corn on the cobb. Oops, don’t forget the crawfish etouffe and crawfish bisque. 😛
 
The world destroys the sanctity and beauty of the Catholic Church, perverting it until there is no longer any trace of God.
 
Being Hungarian I may also add that in Catholic Hungary the pre-lenten season has been for centuries a traditional season of balls, including masquerade balls, and weddings. No weddings would be celebrated during Lent.
 
Ross09 said:
Is any one else disgusted by the hordes of people who flood to New Orleans to “celebrate” Mardi Gras by throwing off their tops? When I was little, I didn’t even know Mardi Gras was part of the Lenten calendar; my family didn’t celebrate Fat Tuesday. I remember even then, being utterly confused about why people were gathering to literally parade around in celebration of sexual immorality.

What is more astounding to me now is how what to Catholics is the beginning of a period of fast and abstinence, a season of contemplation and sacrifice, has become a cacophony of seemingly blasphemous behavior that mocks the solemnity of Lent. :eek:

I feel sorry for the Louisiana Catholics who have had their cultural celebration turned into a Girls Gone Wild fest.
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Born and raised in South Louisiana but I have never liked Mardi Gras. The logic seemed rather sinful. Party and overindulge before lent. I moved to New Orleans 16 years ago and married a woman from here. She had a completely different take on Mardi Gras. She had family memories of sitting out on the parade routes. The Girls Gone Wild part of it is restricted to Burboun Street for the tourists. I live in the Burbs and their little Mardi Gras parade is perfect for families.
 
When the MIL of a friend of mine visited, she had to sit in a wheel-chair because of a bad fracture. She got so many throws on the parade that they could barely carry it home. 😛 And I remember reading an article entitled “Our Mardi Gras - Their Mardi Gras” in the Times Picayune in 2006, how the King of one of these Krewes was a young man with Down Syndrome that year. These are the things that tourists who stick to Bourbon Street will never realize.
 
Joseph_L_Varga said:
When the MIL of a friend of mine visited, she had to sit in a wheel-chair because of a bad fracture. She got so many throws on the parade that they could barely carry it home. 😛 And I remember reading an article entitled “Our Mardi Gras - Their Mardi Gras” in the Times Picayune in 2006, how the King of one of these Krewes was a young man with Down Syndrome that year. These are the things that tourists who stick to Bourbon Street will never realize.
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So true!!! My dh and I are native New Englanders, and our two daughters are native southerners who grew up with Mardi Gras parades, etc… We would occasionally happen to be in Massachusetts for the Fourth of July and would attend a parade in a town south of Boston. They had tremendous parades, but our girls were totally baffled because no one threw beads, candy, trinkets or moon pies to them!

(BTW - we’ve been to Hungary and loved it! What a beautiful place, with great food, I might add!)
 
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