While some of my colleagues in Brazil are celebrating Fat Tuesday as Carnaval, and people in New Orleans throw a Mardi Gras festival, in Chicagoland we celebrate Paczki Day. According to Google Translate, “paczki” is Polish for donut, though it does specifically seem to refer to filled donuts, as that’s what was available the evening before at our local grocery store, with a plethora of filling choices. A quick Google search shows that the ingredients are a little different from a basic donut recipe – these are perhaps a bit denser and maybe should be sold in smaller containers, but all I saw were 4-packs.
Realistically, I know I could pick up a single paczki from a local bakery… if I wanted to pre-order or wait in a long line. These things are popular!
Oddly, I had lived in the Chicagoland area for most of a decade before I learned about paczkis. I was working at a bank – in IT, of course – and as part of a project to computerize some of the paper process, happened to be assigned a branch visit in a heavily Polish-populated area on Paczki Day. It’s not a holiday I remember to celebrate every year, but I noticed this year that the marketing was in full force at the grocery store a couple weeks early. In fact, it was early enough that I doublechecked the calendar to make sure I hadn’t misremembered the date!
What other types of celebrations have you seen for Fat Tuesday?