The Daily: 4 March 2025

Today is Mardi Gras. I don’t much celebrate Fat Tuesday. I like the pancakes, but that’s about it. I don’t drink much, certainly not when I have to be at work in the morning. I’ve no use for purple plastic beads. There aren’t any parades round these parts — because who wants to be standing still outside in March weather. I’ve had King Cake. Not going to repeat that. I do love zydeco, and I was a devout follower of Dr John (no apologies…). So, tonight there will be pancakes and music. But that’s about it.

And that’s okay!

Some traditions just won’t resonate. That is to be expected. I’m tossing out all these ideas to give you ideas, not to dictate a rigid ritual calendar. You may love King Cake and feather boas and glitter. If so, then this is your night. Dust off those Clifton Chenier and Professor Longhair albums and dance all night. Or line up all your friends, deck yourselves in outrageous costumes (big and loud and super-twinkly!), and parade around the neighborhood. Provided the weather works.

That’s really the main problem with Carnival in Vermont. The weather doesn’t work. Today might be the day before the spring fast begins, but it’s still very much winter. And this is a late Lent, about as late as it can be. Mardi Gras can fall any Tuesday between February 3rd and March 9th. This is not a time when Vermonters want to be doing things, especially outdoors. Even skiing is starting to lose its luster by late February. We’re all tired of shoveling snow, and the plowed up mounds are taller than buildings and looking decidedly grey with grime. Who wants to climb over all that to get to the parade route? But even an indoor party will fail to draw people out on a cold Tuesday night when we all have to be at work the next day. And… well… did I mention the cold!

So why do I talk about Mardi Gras at all? Why not follow my own advice and follow the local traditions?

Well, first, I’m not talking to myself. And some of you are bound to find something useful in Mardi Gras and other observances that don’t work for me.

More importantly it’s that Mardi Gras is part of my heritage, and those traditions of your genetic ancestors are important. Mardi Gras is not an old tradition in my family. We’re mostly northerners. But my mother’s parents up and moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, in the 1970s. So Mardi Gras was grafted on to their Shrovetide rituals — the ball games and closing up shop early and eating piles of pancakes all afternoon. This is what my people did at this time of year. It meant something to them. It helps me to feel my way through time to try to understand what meaning they derived from these rituals and symbols. It doesn’t always fit when and where and who I am. Sometimes it’s like Mardi Gras — a fun party that just can’t be adapted to place. Other things are best left in the past. But all of it led to me.

And if you’re reading this, in English, online, then probably a good deal of it led to you also.

I am fortunate. The calendar of my genetic ancestors does resonate and can be followed where I live now. This was not always true. Spring is a very different thing in New Mexico. It comes early. It is chiefly marked by ferocious wind. There are no flowers except those that you have planted and carefully tended through the dry days, though there is an increase in the rodent and rabbit populations, so the tulips will all be eaten… And it ends abruptly, usually by mid-April. Suddenly there is no more weather. It’s just oven hot and too bright and so dry you shrivel a little every time you walk outside. This does not relent until the monsoon starts sometime around the Fourth of July. So what is Spring in all this weather? What is Summer? What does May Day mean where there are no hawthorns? What is Midsummer when it’s been 95° since Easter and you can almost taste the petrichor on the southern winds bringing the end of the heat in a couple weeks? And don’t even get me started on White Christmas… (Yes, there is snow in New Mexico. Yes, it may fall in December. No, there is nothing white about New Mexico Christmas…)

Trying to follow the Wheel of the Year in New Mexico made me viscerally understand that traditions are not universal. Your calendar must be adapted to your place — or you’re just fighting your place and probably creating a good deal of waste in the process.

But I am in Vermont now. New England. Which has a climate that is not particularly different from Old England. So the ritual calendar of my northern ancestors fits this place. Though there still is not much hawthorn… (And no, you don’t want to plant that stuff unless you have acres to spare…)

In any case, many of the traditions of my ancestors have local variants. We are 400 years into the colonizing project. European, especially English, culture has been grafted on to New England. In fact, New England folklore that is not specifically indigenous (ie pre-colonization), points back to those Old England roots anyway. There doesn’t seem to be much new material, except for the folklore of snow and ice (for example, Paul Bunyan). Snow is just not a thing in Europe like it is in New England. Maple sugar is another thing that has been added to old European lore. Truthfully, much of what has been added to the tales brought across the Atlantic is related to plants, because that is how this place differs. There is no hawthorn, but there are so many indigenous plants to mark the time. And then there’s that groundhog, though the day is just an adaptation.

So the traditions of my genetic ancestors are aligned with the traditions of where I am living now because we come from the same stock. But there are older traditions here, and those are perfectly honed to fit the time and place. So why not follow them?

Because that’s not my place…

While I have learned much from Native Americans of both North and South, their culture is not mine. I will adapt or just use the more practical ideas (mostly related to gardening and physical herbal medicine), but I don’t take from the core of their spirituality. Less frequently, I will tell the tales, but even then I don’t tell their stories — I translate the ideas. In any case, I don’t appropriate indigenous traditions. I figure people who look like me have taken enough already. I’m not Native in any sense, and I don’t want to take what isn’t mine, though I will learn from those ideas and try to find parallels in the lore of my own people.

(In an interesting aside, history does show that people who look like me quite often preferred to live with the Natives, preferring Native traditions to the colonizer’s — all those capture stories… and only a few of them ever voluntarily returned. In fact, Anglos called Vermonters the Black French — because most of the immigrants of whatever European stock — though mostly French — became assimilated into the local culture, though they seem to have been rather bad at learning the languages…probably because French is such a chauvinistic language… they didn’t know how to learn new ones even if they were inclined.)

But I don’t have to steal from the locals. The interesting thing is that the more I’ve learned about my own Irish culture, the more I’ve become convinced that truly indigenous cultures the world over share far more similarities than differences. Pagans are pagans wherever you happen to be. After all, we are all the same species with the same needs and the same tendencies. Names may be different, but the stories are broadly the same, given the different local ecosystems. Irish folklore has more to do with cows than Native American folklore does, for example, but the stories told about those cows are eerily similar to the stories told of deer and other magical food-providing beings here on Turtle Island.

And Mardi Gras? Does that have a parallel? Actually, it sort of does. Not the parts about beads, nor confession, nor abstinence looking toward the death of a savior deity. But Spring is a harsh season up north. The central theme of Mardi Gras is to throw a party before tightening your belt another notch — because food is not going to be happening for many more weeks.

In farming communities, winter stores are running low and mostly consist of wrinkled potatoes and potentially lethal moldy grain. There is some milk. There might be eggs… soon… But there isn’t much else to eat. What you plant, when you finally get to do that, will not be food for weeks, if not months.

In foraging communities, there isn’t much in the plant world, though the maple sap will be running… soon… The winter game are thinning out, and most of the hibernating animals haven’t yet shown their faces. There might be fish, if you can drill down through the ice, but you’ll only catch the year-round bony bottom feeders, not the nutritious migrators like shad which won’t be running until the water is warm. And the pemican you made last fall is getting really chewy…

Of course there are many stories and traditions that help humans weather this time of the year — on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the sort of thing traditions were made for! To explain the rough parts of life and to try to smooth them out as best we can.

Lent is older than Christianity. It is a tradition of the land. Mardi Gras may not be that old, but it is a natural response to facing dearth. Get your groove on and dance down the street, laughing at fate.

And then you throw pancakes into the mix…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025