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| Baby Art by Andi Smythe |
"I got the baby!"
I love those plastic babies
that abound during Carnival season. If you ever found one lurking in your slice
of King Cake, then you know the feeling of being pretend king or queen for the
day, a fleeting yet satisfying feeling.
In this issue, we issued a challenge
to a variety of artist to redesign or being inspired by the King Cake baby in
some kind of design. But where did those babies come from? Like most traditions
around making babies, roots of the King Cake lie in ancient pagan roots. Sex
and fertility, it seems, are at the root of most traditions that last.
Celebration of Twelfth Night,
(January 6 on modern calendars, the Twelfth Night after Christmas) goes way
back to Pagan and ancient Roman times. The darkest part of the winter from
Winter Solstice to Twelfth night was a great time to celebrate, party and get a
little crazy for many cultures. Twelfth Night celebrations seem to have a
common ancestor in the King of Saturnalia from Roman times. This popularly
elected "King," also given the delightful name of the "Lord of
Misrule," presided over an old Roman festival that honored Saturn, the god
of agriculture and civilization. The elected royalty would party all night and
have a grand old time, and lead the crowd in unbridled fun and passion around
the bonfire. Back then, at the end of a year of reign, the faux royalty had to
sacrifice themselves to the death at that same bonfire in order to insure
fertility of the crops. Sometimes it's good that traditions change, if you know
what I mean.
I think Queens Emily and Linda
would agree.
But from those roots, those
early frivolities seem to share a theme with more modern times. They seem to
share the idea that someone is picked by chance to have the glory and the power
of being royalty. A-Queen-For-A-Day kind of thing. Choosing your mock royalty
by hiding a token in a cake goes way back. The Romans favored the tradition of
a fava bean or coin in a piece of cake. The fava bean was a symbol of fertility
for the Romans and an important dietary staple. He who found it was elected The
Bean King, The Lord Of Misrule, He Who Was Headed Toward The Funeral Pyre.
Well, of course, the Pagans
couldn't be allowed to run wild for too long before the Church got involved.
The Church knew that people had so much fun and folly during the mid winter
feasts that they would never give it up and get baptized. So like many of the
old rituals involving celebrations, the Church absorbed the masking, disguise,
the chaos and the reign of a Bean King into a sort of Judeo-Christian
tradition. In a great article on the history of the King Cake tradition, King
Cakes: A Rich Tradition, the author writes, " In Europe, from the 16th
century onward, Carnival came to be more or less accepted by Church fathers as
a necessary period of foolishness and folly before the fasting and abstinence
of Lent. Hence, Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, which
marks the beginning of Lent, was one of feasting."
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| Art by Steve Montooth |
This festival also retained its emphasis on masking and mock royalty. The Italians really got into the spirit and to this day, Carnivale and the exquisite Italian paper and clay masks are well known around the world. The Creole Society of the South adopted the party aspect of the whole Carnival idea with the same passion as the Italians and tapped into the Spanish custom of throwing grand balls where a king and queen were chosen. Parades started, krewes went wild and suddenly everyone was masking and having so much fun and forgetting to go to work that the authorities actually outlawed Mardi Gras for a while in New Orleans. That didn't last very long. (You know the drill. If beads are outlawed, then only outlaws will have beads.)
The Twelfth Night Celebration
signals the beginning to the Carnival season which last through Mardi Gras day.
One of the longest lasting krewes in this country, the Twelfth Night Revelers,
hosts the first Carnival ball on January 6th in New Orleans and names their
chosen king "the Lord of Misrule." It is actually quite a serious
affair but at the heart of the celebration, the TNR still poke fun at royalty
by taking on different roles, dressing up to mock royalty, and masking.
During its early years, TNR
embraced the tradition of a cake of randomly picking someone to be the King
(who would then choose his Queen) for the evening of frivolity and mayhem.
Turns out at many of the Twelfth Night Balls, when the partygoers got to the
choosing a piece of cake (adorned with a true crown destined for the person who
would find the token), it was a
"first-come-first-served-all-bets-off" fiasco. One article described
an early attempt at choosing the evenings royalty by finding the charm as
"cake carnage." The token was never found because the inebriated guests
made such a mess of the cake, so no queen was appointed that first official
ball. A delightful image, isn't it? Ladies and gents of the court with cake
crumbs and frosting staining those divine silk gowns and trousers. Now, the
piece containing the token is carefully guided toward the predetermined royalty
and entourage. No one gets hurt and no one is stuck with an outrageous
drycleaning bill.
Twelfth Night, January 6, is
the feast of the Epiphany, the night the Three Kings found Jesus in the stable and
brought him frankincense, gold and myrrh. The day also marks the beginning of
Carnival season. The token included in the cake developed to not only be a bean
or a pea or a coin, but sometimes a figurine. The French make collector
figurines, sometimes of royalty or court figures. In the United States during
the l1800's, often times the token was a pecan or a coin. Some plantation
owners were also known to put jewels in the cake. The little plastic baby
became popular in this county in the mid 1900s, of course after plastic was
invented and we made friends with China.
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| Beading by Linda Hearnes |
Like gumbo, every baker of a
King Cake seems to have his or her own preference about what it really should
be. The standard is made with a rich dough, more like a coffee cake than a
traditional cake and cover with sugar topic in the traditional Mardi Gras
color: purple representing justice, green representing faith, and gold
representing power. New Orleans bakers have love to experiment and make
chocolate, blueberry, cream cheese, pecan praline, even crawfish.
King Cakes, once used to choose
the life of the party, now also earned the religious symbolism. There are tons
of traditions and stories out there, and I don't know which ones are the true
and accepted ones. Some include that baby represents the baby Jesus, who is the
true King; the circular nature of the cake symbolizes the journey of the Wise
Men who traveled to find Him; and the braiding of the dough represents the
twists and turns the Wise Men took in order to hide their trail from King
Herod, who wanted to kill the newborn king to protect his own reign. The
purple, green and gold sugar that adorns every cake represents the official
Mardi Gras Colors, representing, Justice, Faith and Power.
The baby remains one of the
most endearing images of the Carnival Season. Let's get serious--- babies are
cooler than beans or pecans. Now you can find baby figures that are pink,
Caucasian, black, metallic blue, green gold and purple, glow in the dark
cherubs with wings, and like most things Mardi Gras, are made in China. They
are not just hidden away in cakes. The ubiquitous babies adorn necklaces,
beads, tiaras, and jewelry as part of the celebration. The customs keep
developing and keep changing. But the basics of the tradition remain.
You got your Bean King. Your
Lord of Misrule. Your hiding behind a mask. Your cake carnage. Your human
sacrifice. The king and queen expected to lead the willing into mayhem, fun and
excess and espirit de corps. Your royalty chosen by chance. And all
of it represented in the little bare-naked amorphous form of the King Cake
baby. An endearing symbol of Mardi Gras if there ever was one.
Babies. That's what I'm talking
about. And if you are lucky
enough to shout, "I got the baby!" this season, all hail to you. See
you at the bonfire.
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