Posts Tagged ‘memorial day’

Rescheduling Rio’s Carnival?

Sunday, May 29th, 2022

It’s the end of May, 2022, so I’m a month late in writing this, but still…it’s kind of appropriate. Read on.

This year Rio held their Carnival (as in Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday), in person! Live! Drinking, music, food, sights and sounds, pickpockets—all that fun stuff! After several years of canceling it due to Covid-19 pandemic, they were back! Cool.

Except it was rescheduled, it was weeks late.

When I saw that it seemed so WEIRD. How do they move Carnival without also moving Ash Wednesday? And Lent? And Easter?

They moved it to after Easter! What’s the point then? Part of the joy of The Resurrection is knowing Lent is over. Sure, Christ is Risen, that is nice and all, but Lent is about what you give up. The Tuesday before Lent is your last chance to have fun before giving it up. By the time Easter Sunday comes around some people are dying for a cigarette. Lent is over, Hallelujah!

Moving Carnival is like moving the New Hampshire primary to after the convention, because the weather is better that time of year.

Or, like taking conception, pregnancy, and birth, and reordering them on some practical excuse.

The whole point, the reason for drinking too much and partying too hard…is ya not gonna get such treats during Lent, so let’s have so much now as to be sick of them. It’ll be easier that way.

The other reason for this spectacle is to be, well, a spectacle.

Without Lent, isn’t Fat Tuesday mostly just for obese tourists, gawking, drinking, and being unpleasant—as long as they have money?

Tearing Carnival out of the liturgical calendar takes away all the meaning. Makes it just a commercial enterprise. Might as well do something like move all our holidays to the nearest Monday.

-kb, the Kent who writes this on Memorial Day Weekend, which is about mattress sales and the beginning of summer, because the very idea that the very word “memorial” means to preserve a memory…is forgotten.

©2022 Kent Borg

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