Mardi Gras is one of my favorite holidays of the year. Its color scheme is my favorite of all the holidays and I just love all the decorations associated with it, but despite my love for it, I have not participated in any Mardi Gras’ parades since Covid. This is not out of boredom or tiredness of going to parades, but because I’ve just been too busy to go to one. Whether it’s school work or personal art stuff, there was always typically something stopping me from going.
As a kid, I remember participating a lot in Mardi Gras parades every year and tossing beads with my family. Throwing beads was always my favorite part as I tended to get bored easily when standing there and waiting to catch beads. It was fun just to toss them out to people and sometimes even find people that I know out in the crowd while I’m tossing beads.
When I was really young, I remember my pre-school having their own Mardi Gras event where each class got a float and got to toss out beads to crowds as the floats moved across the town. In all honesty, those were probably my favorite parades as I enjoyed being able to hangout with my friends and toss out beads alongside them.
Now that I find myself not as busy during Mardi Gras, I’m hoping that this year things will for once be different and I will actually be able to participate in the holiday in at least some way other than eating king cake.
As of right now though, my plans for the Mardi Gras break are practically unknown. My hopes are to hopefully to get some personal art projects I’ve my own done before classes start back, but at the same time I want to try attending some of the parades or maybe even hang out with family at a Mardi Gras event or something, that way I can finally participate in the holiday like I used to.
The thing is with Mardi Gras is that despite my love for the holiday I can’t say I truly ever fully experienced it. For example, there is the chicken run. I’ve heard a lot about it growing up, but I never experienced or even truly seen one before and to me it always sounded like a lot of fun.
Then, there are just the parades themselves. Sure, I did love being a part of the parades and stuff like that, but as I grew up I started to be less outgoing or confident as I used to be. So, I never had it in me to truly enjoy myself on the holiday by doing stuff like dressing up or jamming to the music. My hope is that now that I’ve grown older and started to become less insecure and nervous that it will be different this time around.
I have my doubts about whether or not I will be able to toss out beads this year, but I at least hope to be outside to catch some. I will say though that it is decently hard to plan around for the holiday, especially with the influx of projects and tests coming up. One thing I’m sure many other students have noticed is that right before a break, we tend to be assigned a multitude of different things, making the week before break stressful for many of us.
As someone who tends to heavily procrastinate, this tends to make it especially difficult for me in terms of planning things, but that is kind of my fault for procrastinating, which I will admit is something that I want to try to get better at avoiding.
Another reason that I find planning so difficult is just that I’m not really a planning type person, at least when it comes to events. I prefer when I am the one who is invited to go out. This leads to many problems sometimes though as I tend to somehow always be busy when I am invited to stuff, so invites to things aren’t very common for me all the time.
This year my hopes are that despite everything, I will be able to actually participate this time around in a Mardi Gras parade, even if it is only for a short while. Before I can do that, I think it’s best for me to focus on all the projects I have due. So as for my plans for Mardi Gras, I’ll just have to wait and see what they might entail.