By Ruth Ann Ruiz
The Post Newspaper Features Editor
Mardi Gras — Galveston style — kicked off Friday evening with a blast of revelers, music, and parades. Visitors from as far away as Maine, Montana, Oregon, California, Mexico City, New Jersey, Kansas, Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, and Pennsylvania arrived on the island parking their campers, cars, trucks, and Airstreams, filling up hotel rooms, vacation rentals and staying with family or friends.
Not everyone came from a long distance. Many cars streamed onto the island with day trippers from Houston and surrounding communities. Based on some calculations, there were more than 100,000 guests for the first weekend of the 2022 edition of Mardi Gras.
They came from all over to enjoy a Texas Gulf Coast tradition that has been hosted in the city of Galveston for 111 years. It wasn’t just visitors from out of town, as islanders themselves lined the streets eager to enjoy Mardi Gras, while still more islanders filled the parades with their golf carts, umbrellas, floats, and live music.
Official parades started on Friday evening and continued into Sunday afternoon. The most popular traditional parades began on Seawall Boulevard and marched down 25th Street and then curved through Downtown. Heavy crowds lined up on the Strand to take in the events.
The weather cooperated for most of the weekend with some slight drizzle setting in on Sunday, but the music and parades went on. After a year with no Mardi Gras due to the pandemic, nothing was going to stop the party.
What was new for 2022? Members of a national Airstream club selected Galveston’s celebration as a destination stop over. They rolled in with their Airstreams and parked on Mechanic St starting on Thursday and stayed through the weekend.
Arms waved in the air to eagerly catch the beads as they were flung from floats and balconies. However, there weren’t as many strings of beads sailing through the air as in years past. Some of that is attributed to supply chain issues, or maybe people are just getting a little more conscientious of our environment. The normal tossing of larger objects such as stuffed animals and pirate hats was also missing from the celebration.
Beautiful, feathered, and bedazzled masquerade masks which historically have been part of the flavor of the celebration were not on display. What replaced the masks? Well, there were a lot of court jester hats. Some attendees were sporting facial paint and there were just a handful of smaller dressed down masquerade masks. Mostly, it was people outside enjoying people with no facial barriers.
Police officers on horseback, in vehicles on motorcycles and on foot from all over the region added to the crowd’s joy and safety. Law enforcement smiled and joked with attendees when appropriate or cast their powerful gaze and moved in a decisive direction to be a more visible presence when needed.
All in all, people were friendly and respectful of each other, there was a lot of “excuse me” and apologies made if someone accidently bumped into another person. “I’ve never been to Mardi Gras in Galveston, and I am really pleased it feels safe and clean,” said a woman who lives as far away as Clear Lake.
Mardi Gras celebrations in some areas of the world start in January right after the day of Epiphany going all the way up to Fat Tuesday, the night before Ash Wednesday.
Everyone gets all their party going and filling up on rich fat food done just in time for the Lenten season. Once Ash Wednesday happens, practicing Catholics, will give up meat on Fridays and make a personal selection of a consumption of some sort to give up till Easter.
Galveston will have another weekend of Mardi Gras celebration on February 26 and 27 and will have a small-scale parade mostly attended by locals on Fat Tuesday which falls on March 1 this year.
