How to Celebrate Mardi Gras

For practicing Christians, Mardi Gras is the last day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. In places where it's celebrated on a grand scale, though, Mardi Gras is the culmination of a colorful, boisterous and nonreligious carnival season, which starts with parties on Twelfth Night in January and gathers steam as Mardi Gras nears. By the final week, revelers take to the streets for parades and raucous festivals.

Difficulty:

Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Ingredients For Creole Recpies
• Mardi Gras Masks
• Airline Tickets To New Orleans
• Steamboat Tickets To New Orleans
• Party Decorations
• Train Tickets To New Orleans
• Bar Supplies

1. Travel to New Orleans (by plane, train or Mississippi River steamboat) and join the celebration. Even if you're not a party animal by nature, it's one of those things that's worth doing once in a lifetime.

2. Call anyone you know in the Crescent City and try to wrangle a ticket to a Mardi Gras ball; otherwise, blend in with the crowds as they dance in the streets and clamor for throws - the cheap beads and trinkets tossed from passing parade floats.

3. Throw your own Mardi Gras party if a trip to New Orleans isn't on the agenda this year. Instruct guests to come in costume, or at least masked; it's a carnival tradition.

4. Decorate in the flamboyant, tongue-in-cheek style of a Mardi Gras parade, with streamers, plastic beads, glittery confetti and shiny fake coins strewn everywhere. Think excess.

5. Stock up on a supply of masks for guests who forget theirs - the glitzier, the better - and hand out noisemakers and toy trumpets.

6. Serve traditional New Orleans drinks such as Sazeracs and Ramos gin fizzes, and dish up Creole specialties such as jambalaya, red fish court bouillon and crayfish (pronounced "crawfish") étouffée. (You'll find recipes for food and drinks in New Orleans cookbooks.)

7. Keep the merriment flowing with a musical backdrop of classic New Orleans jazz.

Tips & Warnings

• Mardi Gras is French for "Fat Tuesday"; traditionally it was the time when people used up all the butter, eggs and lard in the house before giving them up for the 40 days of Lent.

• The next Mardi Gras falls on March 7, 2000.

• If you have even the slightest fear of crowds or distaste for noise, give Mardi Gras a pass; stay home and read Tennessee Williams instead.