Mardi Gras: Origins of the Beads

What is Mardi Gras without beads? While culture, food, and booze is an important part of Mardi Gras, beads is an essential part of Mardi Gras parties and the most popular souvenir thrown at parades (it also signifies good luck). It is now a Multi-Million dollar business and growing each year. Parade crews spend an average of $800-2000 per parade ride every year. There are two types of beads: the hand strung ones, the elaborate less common ones made of several materials. Because they are each hand strung individually they are the most expensive; the most common are those molded on thread and made entirely of plastic and are formed directly onto the string.

Beads weren't always thrown at Mardi Gras. It started around the 1800s for exclusive invitation-only balls. The tradition of throwing beads into the crowd of paraders started with the Twelfth Night Revelers, standing in the street shouting "throw me something, mister." However, beads weren't thrown until the 1920s by the Rex parade, who threw handmade inexpensive necklaces. The first toss was supposedly by a man in a Santa Claus costume. Then, beads were made of glass and imported from Japan and Czechoslovakia, today most are plastic or aluminium and imported from China due rising costs and injury from the glass beads. The first beads were all purple, green, and gold which hold special meanings. The purple represents justice, the green signify faith, and the gold illustrates power. However, as each year passes and the larger the celebrations, beads are now in every color and shape imaginable. (There are even some shops in New Orleans that allows you to make your own beads.) It's now even, mainly in the French Quarter, equated with boisterous behavior; men and women demanding folks show certain parts of their bodies to earn beads. This started around the 1970s, where the young people who gathered here lost their inhibitions in the carnival atmosphere.

As beads get longer and bigger, the biggest one 33" long, and in all shapes or decorations, the cleaning gets harder as more people come from around the world to catch themselves some beads. This year, about 200,000-250,000 people, which is half the size it would be in good weather, came for Mardi Gras. It requires the man power of about 400 people to clean up the entire New Orleans area if the amount of tourists were at its normal size. This year, however, only about an amount of seventy-five plus people was needed to do the job. The trash gets some much it can fill a large trash can, and takes up to three days to clean up all the trash and beads that litter the ground.

Another Mardi Gras has come and gone, and though the crowd wasn't as big as before, and people were a little stingy with the beads, it was a Mardi Gras to remember, and it'll only become better, just as the beads will get more and more outrageous and creative. This multi-million dollar business will only get bigger and bigger so long as Mardi Gras is here and people can't get enough of screaming "Throw me something, mister."