More Carnival wrap-up

I plan on putting out a few more reflections on Mardi Gras 2016 in the coming days; parade reviews, incident reports, photos, that sort of thing. I actually ranked all the uptown parades we saw this year so I'm trying to decide whether I want to write a series of little blurbs or one big listicle.

But nevermind that now. A little over a month ago, we walked over to Magazine Street to see the Krewe of Loup Garou become the first (sort of) parade type thing to happen uptown this year.  Afterward, I wrote a little bit about differences between early and late Mardi Gras.

This week, Bart Everson's Mid-City Messenger column looks at the almost unthinkable prospect of Christian ecclesiastical leaders across the globe determining a fixed date for Easter (and thus for Mardi Gras) in the near future.  Bart, convincingly argues that a freeze in the movement of our feast separates it from one of its core mysteries.

Bring it on, you say. Fix the date and let the good times roll.

I’m sorry, but I can’t get behind that.

You see, in the final analysis, this all comes down to the moon. Easter is currently calculated by finding the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The only way to fix the date for Easter would be to ignore the moon entirely.

That’s just totally uncool. The moon is awesome. Factoring out the moon is the opposite of awesome.

The moon is variable, constantly changing. Some associate the full moon with irrational behavior, from which we derive the word lunacy. All the variability and madness of the Carnival season flows from the silvery light of the moon.

I gotta say I agree with Bart. Not only would fixing the date dampen part of the, well, the lunacy, as Bart says. But it would also greatly diminish the significance of catching and consuming the occasional Moon Pie tossed from a float. And no one is made more well off by that.