And I felt like I had woken up on Dec. 26 to find out I’d missed all the presents.

This is only the second time in my life that I’ve been away from south Louisiana for Carnival celebrations, the other being during my stint as an intern in Walt Disney World (that’s a whole other blog, for another day.)

It’s difficult to explain to people unfamiliar with Mardi Gras celebrations about the holiday’s all-consuming nature. Most people see the Bourbon Street drunken debauchery on the nightly news and think that sums up The Greatest Free Show On Earth. The truth is that the crazed folks you see on television are most often your own mild-mannered friends and family members from Ohio, Florida, or North Carolina, and not representative of native Louisiana Mardi Gras-goers.

For me, Mardi Gras is about family, and it’s about traditions.

There’s a spot on the parade route in Metairie, La., a New Orleans suburb, that for many years was my family’s “spot.” Nearly every family has one – a place where you go every year to watch parades, eat good food, and encounter old friends who you perhaps hadn’t seen since the previous Fat Tuesday.

Each year, my siblings and I would ask my dad if we were going back to “our spot.” We knew, of course, that we would. But we loved the reassurance that for a few hours, on a few nights a year, we could inhabit that same space that brought us so many good times and great memories.

By junior high school, I joined the proud ranks of Mardi Gras participants when I began marching in parades as a baton twirler. (Don’t laugh – this was serious business for an awkward 11-year-old.) And for the next half a dozen years, I marched in at least two parades each season, on chilly nights or sunny days, my heart swelling at the cheers of a crowd enjoying this unique community experience.

After college, Mardi Gras changed for me in a way I never imagined.

I moved just a short car-ride to the west, into the heart of Cajun country – Lafayette, La. As a young newspaper reporter, I found myself covering some of the most bizarre and fascinating Carnival traditions unique to rural Louisiana. I’ll never forget one of my first assignments, writing about the Courir de Mardi Gras (translation: “Crazy people chasing chickens through the countryside.”)

It involves young men traveling from farm to farm in search of ingredients for a communal gumbo to be cooked the end of the day. At each stop, the farm owner throws a chicken into the air, and dozens of people dash to catch it, running over anything in their way, including wide-eyed young reporters.

It was a frightening experience at first, but I soon learned that these people loved their Mardi Gras traditions as much as I loved mine, and by the end of the day I was celebrating alongside them.

In all the inevitable chaos of moving to a new city and searching for a new job, I practically forgot about Mardi Gras this year, and it makes me rather sad. But I know that my husband and I will need to develop our own, new Carnival traditions, so that we can take Mardi Gras with us wherever we go.