Uncanny Wednesday
Holiday Psychosis Day
Dixie Music and King Cake Ease the Transition into Carnival Season
About Uncanny Wednesday
Everything feels wrong today. The tree is mulch, the lights have been taken down, the peppermint schnapps has curdled in the fridge. And yet Mardi Gras is near. Today is Uncanny Tuesday, a transitional day for those of us who loved Christmas too much and are now adrift, clutching Mardi Gras beads and wondering how we ended up at this crossroads (a callback to Crossroads, Day 64, but with higher stakes). We nibble on sugar-soaked Carnival pastries while mourning the nativity set we just boxed up. We tap our toes to a washboard beat while still wearing socks with reindeer on them. The solution? Blast some New Orleans brass band music, cut a slice of King Cake the size of a snow shovel, and lean all the way into the weirdness. If you’re lucky, you’ll bite into a plastic King Cake baby. Let the pain of nearly lacerating the roof of your mouth on a diamond-hard Baby Jesus give you the strength to go on.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Buy a King Cake from the nearest bakery. Eat a slice in silence and wait for the sugar to do something.
(B) Recommended
Host an impromptu King Cake ‘unboxing.’ Invite a few friends. Slice dramatically. Whoever gets the baby picks the playlist for the rest of the night. Only Dixie music, zydeco, or brass band funk allowed.
(C) High effort
Throw a Mood Whiplash Party. Decorate half the room in leftover Christmas decor, the other in Mardi Gras chaos. Guests must wear a mix of both. Serve gumbo and eggnog.
Inspiration
King Cake is the perfect dessert for a day like this, not because it’s refined (it rarely is), but because it isn’t really a cake in the traditional sense. Most of the time, it’s a huge, uniform coil of sugar dough buried under a thick layer of garishly colored icing and an avalanche of tinted sugar. This is not a nuanced, sophisticated confection. If that offends you, take it as a challenge to make a nuanced, sophisticated King Cake (actually, that’s a great way to spend Uncanny Tuesday). Until then, we celebrate it for what it is: sweet, excessive, and exactly the wrong/ right thing for this in-between day.
It also makes an excellent metaphor. Like us, King Cake exists in a liminal space, somewhere between bread and dessert, just as we’re somewhere between Christmas and Mardi Gras. Here in the Gulf South, people are already knee-deep in Carnival season. But in places like Minnesota, where February is just another word for frostbite, they’re staring down the fourth snowstorm of the season and wondering if the baby in the cake isn’t on to something. Maybe we should all just climb into a warm cake and let the world unfold. (Okay, that’s too dark. Go eat some cake and watch Oprah.)
Adornments
Watch
Carnival of Souls (1962)
After surviving a car crash, a young woman drifts into a ghostly version of her life, haunted by eerie visions and drawn to an abandoned pavilion on the edge of town.
Black Orpheus (1959)
The ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is reborn amid the vibrant chaos of Carnival in Rio. With a bossa nova beat and dazzling color, the film follow a streetcar driver and his doomed love through sunlit favelas and shadowy underworlds.
Listen
La Danse de Mardi Gras (Traditional)
Sung in Cajun French, “La Danse de Mardi Gras” has been carried on for generations during the rural Courir de Mardi Gras celebrations. Fiddles and accordions wail in a minor key while masked riders sing about begging for charity and chasing a chicken for the communal gumbo.
Read
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Binx Bolling, the protagonist of The Moviegoer, is in the throes of an existential crisis that just so happens to unfold as Carnival approaches.
All on a Mardi Gras Day by Reid Mitchell
Historian Reid Mitchell chronicles the evolution of New Orleans’ Carnival from the 1800s to modern times, unpacking the rituals, eccentric characters, and social dynamics that make the celebration tick. An erudite work for the non-casual fan of Mardi Gras history.