Edit 12: Twelfth Night
The day of the Epiphany has never felt ordinary to me.
For this New Orleans lady it marks Twelfth Night. King’s Day. The official beginning of Carnival season. While two Krewes will roll tonight, it’s not quite time for the huge parades or the sidewalks packed with ladders staked out along a route. What it is time for is the opening of something joyful and grand.
And it begins with color.
Purple, green, and gold.
You’ll find the colors of the season in stores big and small, bakery windows and grocery aisles. They’ll be wrapped around front porches, wrought-iron gates and decorating interiors. King Cakes are delivered, purchased, sliced and shared-sometimes before breakfast, often straight from the box (where the knife STAYS).
It’s always done with a little flair. But how could it not? There’s anticipation baked right in: who will find the baby, who will get the next one, which bakery will come up with the best new iteration, how many more cakes will follow between now and Mardi Gras Day…
On January 6th, the city and its people gear up for what comes next.
The pageantry waits just beyond the horizon: streetcars rolling with purpose, krewes stirring awake, costumes and invitations exchanged. Soon there will be parades and balls, masks and music, beading and brocade, traditions layered year upon year until celebration feels almost architectural. But today is a touch quieter than that.
Today is about the beginning.
In New Orleans, joy has a season, and it’s a season that starts with the simple taste of what’s to come. It slips in through a bakery door or across a kitchen counter, draped in icing, wrapped in colored sugar and fragrant with mouth-watering familiarity.
We do love our King Cakes, and I always schedule one to arrive on Kings Day.
It’s tradition, but it’s also a reminder of how deeply this time of year is tied to my own milestones.
My birthday has always lived inside this season. Every year, it arrives somewhere between the first King Cake and the final parade-woven into Carnival like it belongs there. My 18th fell directly on Mardi Gras Day and it was nearly indescribable. It felt as if the entire city was celebrating with me (which as a newly minted adult I decided they were).
This year it will come pretty close as it falls just before Mardi Gras Day. The time for celebrating has been inching closer, waiting to gather everything at once.
And so I’ll be making my way back home.
Back to my parents. Back to familiar streets and old rhythms. Back to friends who know this season the same way I do-not just as an event, but a feeling as well.
We celebrate together in the way New Orleans always has: over food and drinks, between parades, and in conversations and down tables that stretch longer than planned.
My birthday isn’t separate from Carnival-it’s surrounded by it.
I carry this with me wherever I go. A reminder that culture isn’t just where you live-it’s what lives in you. That heritage shows up not only in grand gestures, but in the calendar days your body recognizes instinctively and in the way certain seasons feel personal because they always have been.
Today doesn’t ask us to rush ahead.
It simply opens the door to color, rhythm, and a celebration that unfolds in its own time.
And for me? To home.
