Mais Cher, What is a King Cake, huh?

Here I am, I have been raving about king cakes, pointing my little scepter and saying, "Good, bad, not so good, not so bad" when it occurred to me that some of you are not really clear as to what a king cake is.

Like many Christian traditions, it is one that has roots in pagan tradition but has been changed over time.

Of course, that could lead me down another road entirely. I find it irritating when people say that other people stole someone else's tradition. I mean, pretty much the Romans stole their mythology from the Greeks, but no one ever says that. They just accept that there's a Greek name and a Roman name. And of course, there's always the emperor Constantine, who became a Christian, but who had been a pagan for most of his life. And they expected him to just throw out a lifetime of traditions in two seconds? Yeah, YOU try doing that. But anyhow...

The pagan ritual that this is very loosely based on has to do with ancient traditions. A young man was selected to be a king for the day. They would bake a cake and put either a bean or a coin in it. The lucky fellow who happened on it was feted and honored for exactly one day, then he was sacrificed. Of course, it goes without saying that this fellow was more than likely not of a royal class, and more than likely a slave. Sacrifice for the good of the harvest may have been preferable to the life he currently lived. Maybe his family even got a little bonus -- who knows?

However, human sacrifice was frowned upon in the Christian church. So their king for the day became a spiritual king. Not Jesus, one of the Magi, the three Kings who visited Jesus. Since Jesus' birthday was Christmas, they estimated that the kings came to visit 12 days after his birth, on or around January 6, or Twelfth Night. They re-created the king cake scenario, except that this time the king got to live, and they celebrated a new king and his court every week until Ash Wednesday. The Twelfth Night Revelers in 1870 were the first to also choose a queen. It would be 80 years before the first krewe was actually formed, but this was the definite beginning of a new era in the celebration of Mardi Gras.