We All Know the Drill for How to Get Mardi Gras Beads — Here Is the Meaning Behind Them

Every year, cities across the United States pause in March to celebrate an annual festival known as Mardi Gras. The celebrations are most concentrated in areas such as New Orleans, Mobile, and other nearby cities.

The celebration itself has deep and meaningful historic roots, but it comes with a visual spectacle that often supersedes the festival's meaning.

Some of the visuals orbit around the heavy usage of beads. Specifically, purple, gold, green, and silver beads. So what is the meaning behind the beads at Mardi Gras? Here's what we know about why the beads were incorporated into this celebration and why the festival was created to begin with.

If you attend a Mardi Gras parade, you can expect a few things: a visual spectacle, loud music, elaborate floats and costumes, excellent food — and beads.

The beads are often cheap plastic necklaces that come in a variety of sizes, patterns, and shapes. And they are tossed from floats or walkers in the parade to those enthusiastically cheering from the sidelines. Traditionally, women flash their chests to earn the biggest haul, but that's not required.

The meaning behind the beads traces back to the 19th century, according to Time. In the 1890s, a "carnival king" threw fake gems, beads, and rings to his "loyal subjects" during the parade.

In the 1920s, one of the parade Krewes, which we'll explain in a moment, started throwing glass Czech beads, which led to the plastic bead necklaces we know and love today.

Shortly after the bead necklaces became popular, other items were thrown including dubloons and other mock items of wealth and status. The imagery of throwing items of wealth to the onlookers is very much tied into the meaning at the heart of Mardi Gras: anti-establishment and anti-royalty sentiment.

At its heart, Mardi Gras is honored as both a glut before the famine and a celebratory mockery of wealth and royalty. It began in medieval Europe around Rome, and eventually moved its way into France according to USA Today.

Celebrated from Jan. 6 until Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras is a pre-Lent celebration, along with a celebration of the people and the average worker thumbing their nose at royalty. Around 1699, French colonists brought the tradition to the United States, settling around what we now call Mobile and New Orleans.

Once called "Boeuf Gras," meaning, "fatted calf," the Mardi Gras season was a time of indulgence for foods, sweets, and alcohol as people to prepared to abstain for the Lent season.

Parades held during the season are helmed by "krewes" who all dress up as different royal and mythological figures, organizing to throw different items representing wealth to the people on the parade sidelines.

Officially, Mardi Gras is just a time of glut and excess as people prepare to be sparse during Lent, according to USA Today.

Unofficially, locals will tell you that it's all about mocking royalty and putting up the middle finger at the government or monarchy establishments.

Considering the rich French tradition of mocking royalty through theater and celebration, this explanation holds a lot of water.

So when you're attending a Mardi Gras celebration, you can look at it two ways. Either you're getting in the last big hurrah before you focus on cleansing and abstention. Or you're mocking the big guys at the top by wearing exaggerated costumes to mock their finery and donning fake items of wealth to show the absurdity of it all.

Dealer's choice, really.