Apart from celebrating love, the month of February holds a fun, yearly festival: Mardi Gras! The week-long festival is most commonly celebrated in New Orleans where musical events such as parades, picnics, floats and costumes fill up the city. The holiday signifies that the pre-Lenten season has ended, and is celebrated on every Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. The festival originated in France, where it’s also known as Fat Tuesday. Since Mardi means Tuesday and Gras means fat, most attendees of the festival eat all of their fats and meats before Lent! The vibrant purple, green, and gold of Mardi Gras always attracts hundreds of people to enjoy the festival in New Orleans! 

   Charter’s French Honor Society brought a taste of the festival to campus by selling Mardi Gras Grams! These fun goodie bags contain items such as temporary tattoos and fun purple, green and gold bracelets! The French Honor Society sold these bags for $1 and Junior Nadjeen Cinevert even mentioned, “We advertised during A and B lunch and sold out in 2 days!” The club’s been putting together these grams for a number of years now and was forced to stop because the past leadership was not so active and the club overall never had time to do things like these grams. It was not until their President, Christian Manuel brought it to their attention again this year so they decided to start selling them again. 

   For the French Honor Society, Mardi Gras is an event they wanted to show love for, specifically to make sure that students can understand at least one major aspect of French culture. Julia Lobodzinski, a member of the French Honor Society club said, “These grams allow the club to celebrate Mardi Gras with the school in a unique way.” Many students showed a lot of love for this and it was a very nice and creative way to give back to the club!