A Mardi Gras celebration hosted by the Franco-American Programs at the University of Maine. Photo courtesy of Franco-American Programs

We’re all familiar with what the scene will be like this week in New Orleans, its streets awash in purple, green and gold and filled to the brim with bead-tossing partiers masquerading and parading.

Mardi Gras is a big deal in The Big Easy, where the influence of its French settlers endures. Meanwhile, in northern Maine, where French lineage also looms large, many cultural traditions have fallen by the wayside, and the carousing that once took place on Fat Tuesday — the day before the start of Lent (March 4 this year) — is now merely a memory, and a fading one at that.

“A lot of these traditions have been eroded by secular culture and the fact that we’re in a larger melting pot now,” said Patrick Lacroix, director of Acadian Archives at the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

Granted, the scene in the St. John Valley on Mardi Gras wasn’t like what you’d see on Bourbon Street today, but it was still pretty wild, in its own way.

Don Levesque, who grew up in Grand Isle, remembers his mother and her friends dressing up in rags or trading clothes and wearing them inside-out to go from house to house, barging in and startling its inhabitants, then rummaging through their closets and cupboards.

“It was pretty much a Halloween for adults,” he said.

Levesque, now 77, was 12 or 13 at the time, and he and his friends would pull their own pranks too. He remembers carving notches into a wooden spool, then trudging through 3 feet of snow to his friend’s grandparents house to spin it against the window, making a deafening noise inside. They screamed, then came outside to find the boys unable to run because of the snow and started laughing.

“We didn’t plan our getaway very well,” said Levesque, former publisher of the St. John Valley Times and president of Le Club Français, which tries to kept the French language alive in Northern Maine with after-school programs and adult conversation courses.

ACADIAN TRADITIONS

Not surprisingly, Levesque’s memories are more in line with what’s known as Courir de Mardi Gras, celebrated in the South Louisiana countryside by the Cajun population, descended from Acadians who were deported from eastern Canada in the mid-1700s  — and distant cousins of Franco-Americans in northern Maine whose ancestors sought refuge from the British in the St. John Valley.

Traditions of Cajun Mardi Gras include costumed people sneaking onto farms and begging for food, as documented in the 1993 film “Dance for a Chicken” and a 2018 episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” — evidence of the successful revival of Cajun culture, which started in the 1960s, around the time traditions in Northern Maine were coming to an end.

Also like in Cajun country, Mardi Gras celebrations in Northern Maine varied from town to town.

Don Cyr, director of the Association culturelle et historique du Mont-Carmel, said in the village of Lille, where he is from, the tradition originally was for people to dress up and go from house to house to get candy. Considering the weather in winter in Northern Maine, he said, that custom was naturally taken over by Halloween, with Mardi Gras celebrations moving indoors.

Cyr said there was a Catholic school run by nuns from France with an arts-centric education, and they would have games and a dance and put on skits, some incorporating the pranks associated with the holiday — kind of like April Fools’ Day — until that school closed in the 1960s.

“A lot of the traditions got moved elsewhere,” Cyr said.

Another holiday that “took up the slack from Mardi Gras,” he said, was Mi-Carême, or Mid-Lent, when Catholics were allowed a break, to indulge in whatever they had given up for a day.

Cyr remembers making candy out of molasses, which they’d pour on snow and roll onto a stick, like a saltwater taffy lollipop.

Lacroix, from the Acadian Archives, said he still hears older people in Northern Maine speak fondly of Mi-Carême, perhaps because it was particularly important to children, daunted by the idea of giving up something for a full 40 days.

For Lisa Desjardins Michaud, it was usually candy or soda.

Growing up in Van Buren, she remembers a Mardi Gras parade through town with people riding on the backs of trucks, making “all kinds of noise going down the street.”

She said her parents would to go to a dance at the Knights of Columbus, dressed up in beads and costumes — one time, as characters from “Gunsmoke,” she thinks.

ATTEMPTS AT REVIVAL

Michaud, who is the coordinator of community engagement for the Franco-American Programs at the University of Maine, has tried to keep some traditions alive with an annual Mardi Gras event on the Orono campus, drawing between 30 and 60 attendees most years — from both the university and the community — for a potluck, music and dancing.

Robert Daigle, who started the event in the ’90s, put together a cookbook of Franco-American recipes to mark the occasion. It included Mother’s Soft Molasses Cookies, the type of indulgence that would be given up after Mardi Gras, and Salmon Pie, which would take the place of meat-based tourtière on Fridays during Lent.

In the cookbook’s intro, in addition to his plea to preserve Franco-American culture, Daigle cites Edward Wiggin’s “History of Aroostook,” published in 1922, which called Mardi Gras “the chief holiday of the year” among the area’s French population.

“I’m just trying to keep that tradition alive a little bit. I like for people to realize it occurred here as well,” Michaud said about the event in Orono — happening this year from 6-8 p.m. on March 4 at UMaine’s Crossland Hall.

A couple years ago, the Madawaska-based Le Club Français tried to educate local schoolchildren about the history of Mardi Gras in the region by bringing traditional Acadian foods, like chicken stew, into their cafeterias, along with table cards describing the celebrations.

“We did that hoping to revive it, but they just ate and left,” Levesque, the club’s president, said. “It’s kind of sad, another tradition gone. Our culture’s dying.”