Time until Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the last day before Lent. It sits exactly 47 days before Easter Sunday, so it moves with Easter and can fall anywhere from early February to early March. The same day is Pancake Day in Britain and Carnival across much of Catholic Europe and Latin America. New Orleans treats it as a legal holiday, with the parade season running for weeks before the Tuesday itself.

In New Orleans the parades run for about two weeks beforehand, with the largest on the final weekend and on the Tuesday itself, so accommodation there is priced by the parade calendar rather than by the season. Everything stops at midnight, when the police clear the streets and Ash Wednesday begins. Elsewhere the day is quieter and more domestic: pancakes in Britain and Ireland, using up eggs and fat before the Lenten fast, and carnival processions in Brazil, Italy and the Rhineland with their own local peaks on the days before. Because the date is tied to Easter, schools in some countries take a half-term break around it in one year and not in the next, and the same is true of the carnival days off given in parts of Germany and Belgium.

Venice fills its squares with masks for a fortnight and closes with a Tuesday that ends at midnight like everywhere else. Trinidad and Tobago give both the Monday and the Tuesday to street bands, starting before dawn on the Monday with J'ouvert. Binche in Belgium sends out its Gilles at first light, and the costume may not be worn anywhere else. The length of the season is what people misjudge: it opens on 6 January in most traditions and closes on this Tuesday, so its span is dictated by Easter and can differ by more than a month between one year and the next.

The next one falls on Tuesday, 9 February 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Carnival is the season before Lent and the word probably comes from carne levare, the taking away of meat. A last day of excess was practical as much as festive: eggs, butter and fat would not survive forty days of fasting, so they were used up, which is where pancakes, doughnuts and the Polish paczki all come from. Fat Thursday, five days before, is the peak of that in Poland and parts of Germany, and the week between the two is where most of the eating happens.

New Orleans runs on krewes, private organisations that build the floats, choose a monarch and pay for the parade, the oldest of which have been going since the 1850s and 1870s. What they throw is the currency of the day: beads, doubloons stamped with the krewe's emblem, and the hand-decorated coconuts of the Zulu club, which are prized enough that state law was amended to limit the liability for handing them out. No parade may enter the French Quarter, whose streets are too narrow to take a float safely.