Krewe

A krewe (/kruː/ KROO) is a social organization that stages parades and/or balls for the Carnival season. The term is best known for its association with Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, but is also used in other Carnival celebrations throughout Louisiana (e.g. in Lafayette, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge) and along the Gulf of Mexico, such as the Gasparilla Pirate Festival in Tampa, Florida, Springtime Tallahassee, and Krewe of Amalee in DeLand, Florida with the Mardi Gras on Mainstreet Parade as well as in La Crosse, Wisconsin^[1] and at the Saint Paul Winter Carnival.

The word is thought to have been coined in the early 19th century by a New Orleans–based organization calling themselves Ye Mistick Krewe of Comus,^[2] as an archaic affectation; with time, it became the most common term for a New Orleans Carnival organization. The Mistick Krewe of Comus itself was inspired by the Cowbellion de Rakin Society that dated from 1830, a mystic society that organizes annual parades in Mobile, Alabama.^[3]

The krewe system then spread from Mobile and New Orleans to other towns and cities with French Catholic heritage, including those with their own Mardi Gras traditions (such as the Courir de Mardi Gras). Following those of New Orleans, Louisiana's next-oldest krewes are mostly based near Lafayette, which crowned its first Rex-style monarch, King Attakapas, in 1897.^[4] The state's oldest extant children's krewe, Oberon, is also based in Lafayette, and was founded in 1928.^[5]

Today, most Carnival krewes date their origins to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.