Preparations for Mardi Gras are underway in New Orleans as city officials met on Tuesday to announce the city's official countdown to the annual event.
Tuesday, the 12th day after Christmas, is recognized as the Feast of the Epiphany in Christianity.
"Everybody knows that this is what we live for," New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at Mardi Gras World, a riverside warehouse where many of the floats used in the yearly Carnival season processions are stored. "Nobody handles the business of joy better than the city of New Orleans."
The first documented Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans in 1837 took about three decades to become a welcomed celebration.
On Tuesday, amid tables of beads and decorations for the upcoming festivities, Landrieu and other city officials took part in the ceremonial slicing of a King Cake.
The traditional Carnival cake was once a dry loaf but is now a sweet confection with plenty of icing. Inside the cake is a trinket -- often a small plastic or porcelain baby -- that originally symbolized the baby Jesus, but is now also more generally recognized as a symbol for luck and prosperity.
The king cakes have arrived in the @nolanews newsroom! Fancy ones from @cochonbutcher. #nolamardigras pic.twitter.com/mQcChn5AHH— Carlie Kollath Wells (@carlie_kollath) January 6, 2015
The tradition of the cake dates back to 1870, but in modern New Orleans, you can get one via Uber, which is partnering with a bakery in New Orelans to deliver King Cakes for the first day of the Carnival Season.
Later on Tuesday, a group of masked revelers called the Phorty Phunny Phellows were scheduled to take their annual "Twelfth Night" streetcar ride through town, a decades-old tradition marking the official start of the season.
Carnival is celebrated along the Gulf Coast with parties, balls and parades culminating on Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, a final day of celebration before the solemnity of Ash Wednesday and Lent. Mardi Gras falls on Feb. 17 this year.
Carnival season is a major tourist draw in New Orleans, especially in the final two weekends when the best-known parades roll, often with local and national celebrities aboard the floats.
It's a major factor in the city's $6 billion tourism economy.
"It’s just another Tuesday everywhere else in the world, but in New Orleans it is a day that we celebrate our distinct history and culture,” said Stephen Perry, the president and CEO of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Mardi Gras embodies why people travel to New Orleans year round –- great food, lively music and always a reason to celebrate.”
The tourism bureau sent out the year's Royal Invitation Tuesday, an official announcement started by the Rex Organization in 1872.
Poor weather on Fat Tuesday put a damper on the Carnival last year, but locals are optimistic for 2015, which will be the 10th Mardi Gras since Hurricane Katrina.
Additional reporting by the Associated Press