>…is something that I don’t really “get”, despite having lived here for a bit.

It appears to involve dancing girls, excessive rowdiness, inane songs, vast quantities of alcohol and significant slapstick humour. (Others appear to have their problems, too.)

But it always kicks off on 11 November at 11:11 and always finishes on the day before Ash Wednesday.

Which is the Wednesday after the 7th Sunday before Easter. Which itself is the first Sunday after the first Spring full moon. (Still with me..?)

This year is REALLY early – it’s all over on 5 February (compared with 28 February in 2006), so you can imagine that things get a little hectic.

Especially for Magda Wilhelm, our local carpenter’s wife, who’s a seamstress (a really good one, sez Ms jb) and makes costumes for the dancing girls for various Karnevalsitzungen (That’s where the dancing girls, rowdiness, booze etc comes into play..)

And this year she’s got a HUGE problem.

There’s no lace to be had. Anywhere. It’s in a container on a ship between China and here.

My theory is that the chappies who do the logistics for this sort of stuff forgot to press the “Special Event” button, the factories kept on making lace at the usual pace and it’ll all arrive sometime in March.

A bit late, but early enough for next year.

Carneval’s pretty much normal (if that word applies..) next year and it’ll never be as early as this year until 2160.

And again in 2285.

I don’t think Magda’s going to much bothered about that…

09 Jan This entry was published on 9 January, 2008 at 11:56 and is filed under Culture, Mainz. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.