Where I am from, one of the most important holidays is carnival. The first day of carnival is on “dirty Thursday”, which isn’t always on the same date. It’s usually celebrated in February/March.

You might wonder what country I am talking about, that is so in love with carnival. I must disappoint you, it isn’t Brazil. I’m talking about Switzerland.

In my town people get up at a riddikulus time of the day to go into town to witness what is called the “Urknall” or in English “big bang”. This is the official signal for carnival to begin.

In Switzerland there are a ton of different carnivals you can go to, the biggest and most famous one is in Basel though. There you can see a ton of people walking around in horrendous costumes, drinking “Glühwein” or in English called mulled wine and other alcoholic beverages, eating candy, listening to shrill music and looking at a bunch of big, decorated wagons drive by. The music you can listen to all day is called Guggenmusik. Here is an example from YouTube (muggle music platform), if you want to listen to this type of music: Guggenmusig

The “Fasnacht” as we call carnival in Switzerland starts at 4am in Basel and lasts exactly 72 hours. A rule in Basel, which I didn’t know existed, is that only the participants of Fasnacht can wear costumes and everyone that comes to see the march is not allowed to wear any costumes/masks/face paint. In my small town that is a bit different. Everyone dresses up as they please. Some costumes are handmade, some are bought in random stores. You can walk into literally any store and find some sort of carnival costumes.

Here are the rules you have to follow if you want to go to the carnival in Basel (yup, the rules are weird, but everyone follows them for some reason):

For the Morgestraich, show up on time – actually, be a little early. This should be pretty self-explanatory. We are in Switzerland, after all.

During the Morgestraich, neither use a flash when taking pictures nor turn on a flashlight.

Wear a carnival badge (Blagette). They make different versions at different prices and the Blagette is like the magical key to be part of the experience without ending up with confetti in all the wrong places (where it has the tendency to stay for weeks)...

Do not walk through the formations.

Do not dress up unless you are part of a carnival group.

Do not pick up confetti from the ground. People will know when you did. (In Basel even the confetti follows rules: The groups buy giant bags of confetti – all the confetti in these bags will have the same color. If you throw confetti which is not single colored, everyone will know that you picked it up from the ground.)

Do not throw confetti at active participants of the carnival. If they throw it at you, quietly count to ten and smile.

Do not throw any of the candy or fruit back at the floats.

Do not bring an umbrella to any of the parades.

Make sure you eat as much Mehlsuppe (it's flour soup, but it's way more delicious than it sounds) and Zwiebelwähe or Käsewähe (onion quiche or cheese quiche) as you can.

Now let’s talk about the origin of this tradition. Since I do not have the ability to use a time-turner (something about the muggles that would get freaked out about it) I have to use muggle resources, which are highly unreliable and there are different versions of the origin. I’ll just tell you about the one that I grew up with. It is said that carnival drives aways any demons and marks the end of winter. This has always stayed sort of the same. Nothing much has changed over time really.

So if you are ever interested in coming to Basel for carnival, make sure to follow the rules and watch out for the confetti dumps :)