Every year before the start of Lent in hundreds of cities around the world there is a massive celebration

While the celebrations differ sometimes dramatically there are certain elements that they all share

Modern celebrations can often get quite racy and if you didn't know it you'd

probably never guess that the origins of the festival are actually religious in

nature. Learn more about Carnival and Mardi Gras and how the modern celebrations

came to be on this episode of Everything and festivals.

There's a large number of them that have some ancient origin that can be traced back to some civilization

thousands of years ago.

Carnival is not such a festival. I found several people who tried

to tie Carnival back to something in ancient Greece, Rome, or Egypt, but the fact is

whatever festivals they had, they were not actual precursors to carnival.

There may have been other holidays that have a tenuous connection to Saturnalia or Lupercalia,

but I don't think that this is one of them.

There may have been mass-worn and other revelries in ancient celebrations but that's a

pretty general thing and I'm just not convinced that this is the case where

there's any sort of direct link. Carnival and Mardi Gras and for brevity I'm

just going to refer to it as Carnival for the rest of the episode as it's a more generic term for the exact same thing is intimately tied to the Christian religious calendar

the date which determines when carnival will be celebrated is Easter.

For those of you who are not in Christian countries,

Easter is the day that Christian celebrate the resurrection of Christ.

The date of Easter has been contentious throughout history, and it might be worth its own episode in the future.

Suffice it to say for this episode and in the Western calendar, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. That means in theory the

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