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What does Carnival Celebrate?
The quick answer to the question, is that Carnival, celebrates the end of winter and the coming Spring season. However to fully understand and more completely answer the question of what Carnival celebrates, we must give you the history of how the celebration began.
The proper name of the celebration is the, Festival of Carnival. Carnival occurs between January 6th, each year and ends one day before Ash Wednesday, which marks the arrival of the fasting days of Lent.
There are primarily 4 different styles of Carnival celebrated through out the world. Our style of the celebration has it's Origination in the pagan spring fertility rite. The first recorded carnival, was the Egyptian feast of Osiris, an event marking the receding of the Nile's flood water.
Carnivale', as originally spoken in our root tongue, reached a peak of riotous dissipation with the Roman BACCHANALIA (this is our root style) and Saturnalia. During the late period of the era, in what human history considers the Middle Ages, the Church attempted to control the celebrations. Popes sometimes served as patrons, the worst excesses were gradually eliminated, and carnival was assimilated as a last festival before the asceticism (the start) of Lent.
Our style of the carnival tradition still flourishes in Belgium, Italy, France, and West Germany. In the Western Hemisphere, the principal carnivals are those in Rio de Janeiro (begun c.1840) and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans (begun around 1732).
Carnival, is a celebration combining parades, pageantry, folk drama, and feasting. Carnival, from the Latin, carnelevarium ("to remove meat"), typically begins early in the new year, often on the Epiphany, January 6, the 12th day after Christmas and ends on MARDI GRAS or Shrove Tuesday.
Mardi Gras Day, the last day of Carnival, is celebrated as a legal holiday only in Louisiana, in the United States. It is a day that has a moving or different date, each and every year. If you would like to know how to find the dates of Mardi Gras click here.
Pre-Christian, medieval, and modern carnivals share important features or themes. They all celebrate the death of winter and the rebirth of nature, or Spring, ultimately recommitting the individual, to the spiritual and social codes of the culture. Ancient fertility rites, with their sacrifices to the gods, exemplify this commitment, as do the Christian Shrovetide plays. On the other hand, carnivals allow parody of, and offer temporary release from, social and religious constraints. For example, slaves were the equals of their masters during the Roman Saturnalia; the medieval feast of fools included a blasphemous mass; and during carnival masquerades, most if not all sexual and social taboos, were sometimes temporarily suspended.
New Orleans has had the celebration in it's present form starting around 1857. When the Krewe of Comus the oldest of the modern era organizations, first held it's parade in New Orleans, leading to the more organized and orderly era of celebrating the Carnival season. To learn more on the total time line of the Carnival in New Orleans, click here.
Most people who have very little direct knowledge of the festival call it by the name, Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras, has come, (incorrectly) to represent the entire carnival period. Mardi Gras, or Shrove Tuesday as it is called, in the UK, is the name given to, the last day, of the period known as, Carnival.