It's Carnival Time!

One of the things I love about living in Spain is the constant celebration of all things fun ... here life is often one long fiesta ... with street parades, parties in squares and processions being an important part of local life.

This month it's all about Carnival, and being English and bought up in a country where Carnival is not really celebrated, I do find the whole thing very exciting and colourful.

Nowhere is Carnival more excitedly celebrated than the local nurseries! Last year my daughter went as a fairy, this was more my doing as being only 2 she didn't really know what was going on anyway. This year she's very excited and has decided she wants to go as Cinderella ( with a nod to Dorothy by wearing her red ruby slippers! ) Her little boyfriend is going to be Spiderman and the pair of them are very very excited!


All this talk about Carnival made me wonder about it's orgins. I don't want to post essays on the subject but did find some trivia that I thought might make interesting reading ...

Where did the word “carnival” come from?

Hundred and hundreds of years ago, the followers of the Catholic religion in Italy started the tradition of holding a wild costume festival right before the first day of Lent. Because Catholics are not supposed to eat meat during Lent, they called their festival, carnevale — which means “to put away the meat.” As time passed, carnivals in Italy became quite famous; and in fact the practice spread to France, Spain, and all the Catholic countries in Europe. Then as the French, Spanish, and Portuguese began to take control of the Americas and other parts of the world, they brought with them their tradition of celebrating carnival.

In many parts of the world, where Catholic Europeans set up colonies and entered into the slave trade, carnival took root. Brazil, once a Portuguese colony, is famous for its carnival, as is Mardi Gras in Louisiana (where African-Americans mixed with French settlers and Native Americans). Carnival celebrations are now found throughout the Caribbean in Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada, Dominica, Haiti, Cuba, St. Thomas, St. Marten; in Central and South America in Belize, Panama, Brazil; and in large cities in Canada and the U.S. where Caribbean people have settled, including Brooklyn, Miami, and Toronto. Even San Francisco has a carnival!

If you want to read more about Carnival take a look at this site! And if you've got a little one heading off for their first carnival ... enjoy!