What is the point of this?

By "this" I don't mean blogging - that's another discussion entirely.

But I'll be a little late for monday's session - at least the part that doesn't involve the English students, and here's why.

There's a fastelavn (I'm sorry I don't know the english word, but at least I can describe it) party in my sons kindergarten, and I have to witness it.

Here's what happens: everyone gets dressed up as something or someone - my son is going as a clown - and then they have this wooden barrel that is filled with candy. Everyone waits his or her turn to beat it with a wooden club until it crashes and the candy falls out. Then you rush to the candy and gather as much as you can, and go back in line to keep beating the barrel. The one who crashes it is crowned "queen of cats", and the one who beats down the last board is the "king of cats".

After that, everyone drinks coffee (not the children...) and eat these special creamfilled muffin-like things called fastelavnsboller.

What is the point of that? I have an idea why we smack the hell out of a wooden barrel, that's something to do with hunting witches in the middle ages, and there used to be cats, not candy in there - but the dressing up part and the eating? The name of the party is short danish-latin for "goodbye meat", i think - but what does that have to do with anything?

I do know one thing though - if i'm not there to witness my son beating that barrel, the whole thing won't matter to him - leading me to another point:

What's the point of commemorating? Is it the thing itself or the people, that we do it with? How important is it for our own individual memory that we each have someone to witness us when we take part in a reconstructing a collective or cultural memory? And why?