It is a festival season which began before lent usually
during the month of February. They used to dress up to change their daily life.
During lent there was no parties and
they used to fast for six weeks and the
people didn’t eat foods which were expensive like meat, dairy products, fats
and sugars. Before the lent any rich foods and drinks had to be put away as an
act to god because he had spent forty days in the cold and no food. The food
that was put away and they would use it for this giant party called the
carnival
The first carnival and masquerade balls were took in
medieval Italy, than spread to Spain, Portugal, France and Rhineland Germany
and New France and North America. From Spain they moved to the Caribbean and Latin
America, the first worldwide carnival took place in cologne Germany in 1823.
carnival in Rome. circa 1650
Some carnival traditions came from the pre- Christian times.
The Italian took the idea from the ancient Roman festivals of saturnalia and
bacchanalia. The saturnalia is the temple of Saturn in the Roman forum. Medieval
pageants were happening from the Greek and ancient festivals. There was also
the corpus Christ which means the Latin rite celebrating the belief in the body
and the blood of Jesus Christ and by this the carnivals where a manifesto of a
medieval folk culture. The costumes are based on the pre Christian rituals of
the rites involving the masked figures in that time.
The West Indian people went to the United Kingdom with
the traditions of the Caribbean celebrations however in these countries Notting
hill, London, Leeds, Yorkshire and other places they became alone and
individual events and are not connected to the religious cycle because they
take place in summer months.
Bibliogrophy:
Carnival - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2013. Carnival - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival. [Accessed 15 May 2013].
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