Carnival season kicks off in New Orleans, offers fun and parades through Fat Tuesday

The Mardi Gras season kicks off in New Orleans Friday, January 6th, known as Twelfth Night. Parades will continue through Mardi Gras Day on Tuesday, February 28th.

The New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau shares that Carnival season "welcomes more than one million revelers to the streets of New Orleans, generating more than $840 million for the local economy each year."

Laissez les bons temps rouler, y'all!

The Krewe of Rex chose the colors of Mardi Gras in 1872, with purple representing justice, gold representing power and green representing faith. Visit New Orleans any time of year and you'll find these colors strewn about the city, from tossed beads hanging from trees in the Garden District to the trinkets hawked in the French Quarter.

To celebrate the season, make sure to buy a king cake! More than 500,000 king cakes are sold each year in New Orleans between January 6th and Fat Tuesday, and another 50,000 are shipped out-of-state via overnight courier. If you don't know what a king cake is, you definitely are overdue to visit the Big Easy (hint: the "baby" is inside the cake.)

Many krewes are known for their unique handmade throws, such as the Krewe of Zulu’s coconuts and the Krewe of Muses’ shoes. I like visiting New Orleans right before Mardis Gras because it's festive enough to catch a parade or four but not so crazy one ends up sleeping with a frat boy!

The 4th Annual King Cake Festival will return this year, celebrating New Orleans’ favorite treat on Sunday, January 29th from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Benefitting babies and children at Ochsner Hospital, King Cake Festival will feature tastings from 15 local bakeries and vendors and live music by Remedy, Roddie Romero & the Hub City All-Stars and Flow Tribe.

Note: This Friday, Windsor Court - which offers a visit across the pond for the price of a five-star Louisiana hotel - will offer complimentary king cake and coffee from 7:00 to 9:30 a.m. at its Café Anglais. Enjoy live jazz by the Tim Laughlin Band. In 2011, Travel + Leisure magazine ranked the Windsor Court the 6th Best Large City Hotel in the United States and Canada.

Photo: By Flickr user radiate2357 - Photo by Flickr user radiate2357 at [1], CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2648932