Fat Tuesday celebrations continue this weekend in New Orleans. With the Mardi Gras in full swing, the fun will continue for the Extended Weekend. Mardi Gras, is a Catholic holiday. The all-night debauchery and gluttony still observed in New Orleans, and during the carnival in Rio and Trinidad, are descended from the Catholic cultures of France and Spain. 
- The idea is to get all the wickedness of your system before 40 days of self-deprivation, or Lent, undertaken in the spirit of Christ’s suffering.
- But the Protestant Reformation, which swept across Northern Europe some 500 years ago, killed off most of the traditions that made Catholic Mardi Gras so much fun.
- As they stripped the church of ornate decoration, reformers railed against the feast-and-famine cycle of extremes.
- Instead, these new Protestants advocated the moderation that has come to characterize Norway as much as Minnesota, where so many 19th-century Scandinavian immigrants settled in the U.S
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