Carnival is Not for me

If there’s a fes­ti­val I don’t get along with, it’s car­ni­val. Be­fore you call me a stick-in-the-mud, the main rea­son I don’t like the fes­ti­val known here as Carnestoltes is due to a trau­matic ex­pe­ri­ence I’ll tell you about in a mo­ment. Apart from that, I can think of other rea­sons why car­ni­val doesn’t make the grade.

For starters, you never know when it’s hap­pen­ing. Christ­mas Day is De­cem­ber 25 every year; it couldn’t be clearer. But the date for car­ni­val is slip­pery, chang­ing each year ac­cord­ing to the lunar cal­en­dar. Tech­ni­cally, car­ni­val takes place seven weeks after the first full moon fol­low­ing the win­ter sol­stice. I mean, how is that any way to or­gan­ise things?

An­other griev­ance I have against car­ni­val is also cal­en­dar-re­lated, in that it takes place in the mid­dle of win­ter. Car­ni­val is above all an open-air fes­ti­val, and most fancy dress - here’s where the clas­sic go­rilla cos­tume comes into its own - is not made to keep you warm. When you’re shiv­er­ing to death at mid­night on the Sit­ges wa­ter­front dressed as a cave­man you can’t be blamed for hav­ing sec­ond thoughts about this car­ni­val busi­ness.

As an aside, some places have post­poned their car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions due to the health cri­sis. Ter­rassa, for ex­am­ple, an­nounced it will hold its car­ni­val be­tween June 2 and 8. If I was them, I’d leave it there - a car­ni­val held in the sum­mer might help bring me back on board.

Car­ni­val is also a bit of a night­mare when you have small chil­dren. Ob­vi­ously kids love dress­ing up, and you wouldn’t want to de­prive them of the chance to be their favourite su­per­hero. Yet when you’re a busy par­ent try­ing to get through the week, fac­tor­ing in mul­ti­ple fancy dress cos­tumes and par­ties is often the last thing you need. I re­mem­ber some years the school would ask my kids to dress up ac­cord­ing to a dif­fer­ent theme every day of the week. Thanks for that, teach­ers!

De­spite these gripes, which I admit are triv­ial, the real rea­son I don’t like car­ni­val is be­cause, as I said ear­lier, I as­so­ci­ate it with a trauma in my life. Here’s how it went down.

When I first came to live in Cat­alo­nia I was an Eng­lish teacher, and my first re­spon­si­bil­ity in the school I worked at was to be the ’min­is­ter of fun’, in other words it was up to me to or­gan­ise the school par­ties and cel­e­bra­tions. It’s a thank­less task, and one of my first jobs was to or­gan­ise the car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tion, the idea being that the teach­ers and stu­dents would dress up for class and meet up for a party af­ter­wards.

My room­mate at the time, who shall re­main name­less, sug­gested we go as Peter Pan and Tin­ker­bell. As she of­fered to make the cos­tumes I agreed as I al­ready had enough to do. I wish I’d thought it through. When the day came, she handed me my cos­tume, which in­volved a lit­tle green miniskirt and tights. It was too late to find an al­ter­na­tive and I didn’t want to hurt her feel­ings, as she’d put so much work into it. At least I wouldn’t be alone, as she would be in a leo­tard and tights as my fairy com­pan­ion.

Well, I ended up very much alone, dressed as Peter Pan, in a miniskirt and tights, and with a red feather in my lit­tle green cap. My room­mate chick­ened out after I’d al­ready left for school dressed as ’The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, and she jus­ti­fied her be­trayal say­ing her cos­tume was too re­veal­ing. Oh, do you think so! To make mat­ters worse, the ef­forts by the rest of the staff were noth­ing short of pa­thetic. There was the odd token cow­boy hat or bur­glar’s mask but al­most no one had gone the whole hog as they had promised, and they cer­tainly didn’t have to spend the rest of the evening in tights, serv­ing as the butt of the joke. I’ve never liked car­ni­val since.