"Mardi Gras" (French for Fat Tuesday) is the day before Ash Wednesday. Mardi Gras is the final day of Carnival, the three day period preceding the beginning of Lent, the Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday immediately before Ash Wednesday (some traditions count Carnival as the entire period of time between Epiphany or Twelfth Night and Ash Wednesday). The entire three day period has now come to be known in many areas as Mardi Gras. Perhaps the cities most famous for their Mardi Gras celebrations include New Orleans, Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama and Sydney, Australia. Many other places have important Fat Tuesday celebrations as well. Carnival is an important celebration in most of Europe, except in the United Kingdom where pancakes are the tradition, and also in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations draw hundreds of thousands of tourists to the city in addition to the celebrating locals for the parties and parades. The starting date of festivities in New Orleans is March 3, 1699, when a group of French explorers set up camp on the west bank of the Mississippi River, about 60 miles downriver from the site that would become New Orleans. Since that day just happened to be Mardi Gras, a major event on the French calendar, the group's leader, Pierre Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville dubbed the spot, in the spelling of the time, La Pointe du Mardy Gras. The Rex organization put a marker at the Louisiana site 300 years later. An account from 1743 notes that the custom of Carnival balls was already established by that date (during the time Bienville was still governor). Processions and masking in the streets on Mardi Gras Day took place, and were sometimes prohibited by law, but were quickly renewed whenever such restrictions were lifted or enforcement waned. In 1833, Bernard Xavier de Marigny de Mandeville, a rich plantation owner, raised the money to fund an official Mardi Gras celebration. On Mardi Gras of 1857 the Mistick Krewe of Comus held its first parade. Comus is the oldest continuously active Mardi Gras organization and started a number of continuing traditions (for example, the use of floats in parades) and is considered the first Carnival krewe in the modern sense. In 1875 Mardi Gras was declared a legal holiday by the state of Louisiana. War, economic, political, and weather conditions sometimes led to cancellation of some or all major parades, especially during the American Civil War, World War I and World War II, but celebration of Carnival has always been observed in the city.
1972 was the last year in which large parades went though the narrow streets of the city's old French Quarter neighborhood; larger floats and crowds and safety concerns led the city government to prohibit big parades in the Quarter. In 1991 the New Orleans city council passed an ordinance that required social organizations, including Mardi Gras Krewes, to certify publicly that they did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, in order to obtain parade permits and other public licenses. In effect, the ordinance required these, and other, private social groups to abandon their traditional code of secrecy and identify their members for the city's Human Relations Commission. In protest, the 19th century krewes Comus and Momus stopped parading. Proteus did parade in the 1992 Carnival season but subsequently also suspended its parade for a time. In 2000, Proteus returned to the parade schedule. Two federal courts later declared that the ordinance was an unconstitutional infringement on First Amendment rights of free association, and an unwarranted intrusion on the privacy of the groups subject to the ordinance. The Supreme Court refused to hear the city's appeal from this decision. Today, many krewes operate under a business structure; membership is basically open to anyone who pays dues to have a place on a parade float.
The date can vary from as early as February 3 to as late as March 9. As it is the last day before the start of Lent, the date is dependent on that of Easter.
Shrove Tuesday (and Mardi Gras) will occur on the following dates in the following years:(carnevale)
2008 — 5 February
2009 — 24 February
2010 — 16 February
2011 — 8 March
2012 — 21 February
2013 — 12 February
2014 — 4 March
2015 — 17 February
2016 — 9 February
2017 — 28 February
2018 — 13 February
2019 — 5 March
2020 — 25 February
2021 — 16 February
2022 — 1 March
2023 — 21 February
2024 — 13 February
2025 — 4 March
2026 — 17 February
2027 — 9 February
2028 — 29 February
2029 — 13 February
2030 — 5 March
2031 — 25 February
2032 — 10 February
2033 — 1 March
2034 — 21 February
2035 — 6 February
2036 — 26 February
2037 — 17 February
2038 — 9 March
2039 — 22 February
2040 — 14 February
2041 — 5 March
2042 — 18 February
2043 — 10 February
2044 — 1 March
2045 — 21 February
2046 — 6 February
2047 — 26 February
2048 — 18 February
2049 — 2 March
2050 — 22 February
