New Orleans Mardi Gras

Festival Location: New Orleans, LA, USA

Festival State: Louisiana Festivals

Festival Type(s): Mardi Gras, Carnivals, Street Parades

Featured Festival: New Orleans Mardi Gras

New Orleans Mardi Gras Media:

Mardi Gras For Families

By: © Michael Schuman 2009

Just tell people you are taking your kids to Mardi Gras and you will see eyebrows raised as high as Mount McKinley.

Well, guess what?

I took my children ages 10 and 12 to New Orleans during Mardi Gras season, officially known as Carnival, and we watched all or part of six parades. We traversed the city via car, taxi and foot, and even covered several blocks of the French Quarter and there wasn't a bare breast in sight — unless you count the orangutans at the Audubon Park Zoo. We eyeballed people decked in costumes from the regal to the ridiculous but we examined not a one that would make a dour moralist go off on a rant about the impending end of western civilization as we know it.

We saw first hand what the city fathers of New Orleans have been saying all along; Mardi Gras is mainly a family event. You just to be careful where you expose yourself. (Okay, maybe not the best choice of words, but you get the idea.)

The fact is that the spring break debauchery associated today with Mardi Gras does take place, but is more or less relegated to a six-block area of Bourbon Street. Arthur Hardy, local Mardi Gras maven and publisher of Arthur Hardy's Mardi Gras Guide says, "The misconception among many is that Mardi Gras is a drunken orgy. That is totally wrong. Mardi Gras is a time for kids and for grownups who can act like kids in a nice way. The nudity that takes place stays mainly in the French Quarter, but with cable and the Internet that image has spread like wildfire."

To answer one basic question, post-Katrina New Orleans is not fully back to normal for some unfortunate residents, but it is more or less back to normal for vacationers. To answer another basic question, the term "Mardi Gras" is French for Fat Tuesday and is always the day before the start of Lent. Communities around the world, especially those with a strong Roman Catholic heritage, have long celebrated this last day before the period of fasting and penitence with festivities; and in some cases the general rule is too much is never enough. Mardi Gras is also New Orleans's debutante season, and some masked balls are open to the public. But to most families, Mardi Gras fun means parades.

We saw parades from two different locations, uptown on St. Charles Avenue in the city's famed Garden District, and downtown on lower Canal Street. The only thing we saw that would make a Midwestern schoolteacher blush was a set of plastic fake breasts hanging on a vender's cart alongside balloons and other trinkets for sale. But we saw no human flesh that one could not see on a Sunday morning in Dubuque.

Unlike the Macy's and the Tournament of Roses parades, Mardi Gras parades are interactive. Parade viewers don't just watch, they catch things, from the ubiquitous beads to all sorts of tchockes. We arrived home with 41 and a half pounds -- yes, 41 and a half pounds -- of beads. We also brought home maybe two dozen plastic cups with the name of each krewe, or parade-sponsoring organization, embossed on them. Our loot list also included a couple dozen metal doubloons, (coins also embossed with the name of the participating krewe), stuffed animals, toy spears, Frisbees, a couple of footballs, some little toy gadgets such as one would get with Happy Meals and even a bag to store our stuff in.

We discovered that the interactive aspect of the parades brings out the quirkiness of the human mind. Ready to watch a whole day of parades on the Sunday before Fat Tuesday, we parked ourselves about 11 a.m. on a curb near the corner of Saint Charles and Jackson avenues an hour before the first parade was scheduled to pass by.

Our reaction to the appearance of the first float coming up the street was unbridled giddiness. And when a string of beads tossed from a Mardi Gras float first was encircled by our sweaty mitts the emotion could have only been matched by the first sight of gold at Sutter's Mill a century and a half ago.

While we saw no fights break out over parade throws, Hardy says he has witnessed altercations, especially after some grab-ees have had a few encounters with alcohol. Still, sobriety doesn't preclude fits of bead envy. Hardy sighs, "There's a bit of macho competitive spirit with people fighting for beads, but then sharing a bunch of the beads they just fought over. It's a strange behavior."

The fact is that first timers wonder if they will ever catch anything. They soon learn it is easy, and women don't have to show anything but their eagerness. The beads will come to you. If you're not careful you might get bopped on the head or in the gut by a pair of wildly flung beads or stuffed toy. Or they may fall into your hands. We lived what Arthur Hardy described, as we had beads grabbed out of our -- and our children's hands -- then offered right back to us. The friendly family next to you can be transformed from the Manson Family to the Partridge Family within the space of a minute. Strange behavior, indeed.

By the time the third parade came by in the mid-afternoon our 12-year-old decided she would sit it out and watch. But she discovered that it's hard to sit anything out as the throws are coming at you. One problem with getting caught up in this frenzy is that it becomes easy to pay too much attention to the throws and ignore the decorative nature of the floats, and some are truly spectacular. The same can be said for the many walking clubs and marching bands, which are the Rodney Dangerfields of Mardi Gras. The school bands might not get respect from out of towners, but as one fellow parade watcher and native New Orleanian told us, they are taken very seriously in this city with its renowned musical heritage.

There was a lull of maybe 90 minutes between the third parade, the krewe of Thoth, and the fourth, the famed Bacchus. Not wanting to lose our curbside spot, we passed the time by snacking on crackers and chips and chatting with the folks around us. Bacchus began rolling by us at about 6 p.m. and the electric lights on the floats made this perhaps the most dazzling of all the parades we saw. Yet after 20 of the scheduled 35 floats had passed and the Louisiana sky had sufficiently darkened we had had enough. In spite of the fact that the parade was still in progress, we headed back to our car, bags of beads and other throws in hand. Weary from parade watching and bead catching, we eschewed fine dining that night and purchased from a parade vendor a pizza which we gobbled down in our room.

While we were intrigued by the thought of watching Monday night's Orpheus parade, sponsored by the krewe founded some years back by Harry Connick, Jr., we decided to skip it, opting to spend Monday at the Aquarium of the Americas at the southern end of the French Quarter. On Fat Tuesday however, we took a cab to Canal Street. This was where the proverbial action was, and it would be a short walk to the Quarter afterwards.

We arrived in time to catch the last half of the Zulu parade. Since it was in progress we could get no closer than the rear of the throng, six rows deep, not a prime position for catching throws. After Zulu ended, the crowd dispersed and we moved to the front by the barricade separating people from parade. An hour later came Rex, the King of Carnival, and within no time we were surrounded by another six rows of humanity. It was here, in the heart of downtown, that we encountered more clamoring crowds, which to the eyes of a float rider must have seemed like feeding time for starved pigeons in a city park. The parade-goers downtown were generally more aggressive than those along Saint Charles. And while Rex, which ends in the early afternoon, might be the climax of Mardi Gras parades on Fat Tuesday, it is not the final one. Throughout much of the afternoon truck parades, in which floats are built on flat bed trucks instead of constructed as independent fixtures pulled by tractors, traverse much of the same route as Rex. Truck parades are sponsored by neighborhood groups and not formal krewes, but throws sail from riders' hands as they do from those on krewe floats.

We stayed in New Orleans two days after Mardi Gras, a good idea for those who wish to get a taste of the city in its normality. We enjoyed the park-like Audubon Zoo, especially the carefully recreated Louisiana swamp complete with a Cajun house floating on water. We indulged in beignets, the powdered sugar coated French doughnuts at Café du Monde, and checked out a few of the city's smaller museums. And we drove home with beads. Lots and lots of beads.

by Michael Schuman

New Orleans Mardi Gras Photos:

New Orleans Mardi Gras Dates and Location

New Orleans Mardi Gras runs for two weeks culminating on Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Check out the Mardi Gras New Orleans web site for more information and up-to-the-minute dates and details.