Today is Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Fastnacht, Pancake Day. I have used my usual awesome scientific research method of asking two Canadians and neither know that it is pancake day. There are no jiff lemon adverts on TV, no packets of pancake mix at the ends of supermarket aisles. Boohoo. I will be filling the kitchen with smoking oil later on, pouring that batter mix into a sizzling pan and generally making a loverly mess. We won't be eating them with lemon and caster sugar though, in fact I couldn't even remember the word we use here for caster sugar earlier. But then we do have the divine maple syrup here, so that'll do me.
I'm a bit under the weather at the moment, throat feels like a small rodent died in it, temperature is slightly sub tropical. The reason I say this is to explain a certain lack of cohesion in my thinking. The brain is certainly not firing on all cylinders today.
So, working backwards. We eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday because we need to use up our jiff lemons? No, that's not it, to use up our fats and eggs before sending Jesus off into the desert to starve and hallucinate ? Yes, that's it. So before the 40 days of Jesus's exile and testing, we have to be shriven, confess our sins and be given absolution. Well, I remember when I worked in a catholic school the pupils had to go to mass in the morning of Ash Wednesday and then they would wear a mark of a cross made of ash on their foreheads all day.
Lots of people in Britain and Europe do still give things up for Lent. I used to observe Lent quite closely myself, I saw it as a time for reflection and meditation, of self-control.
Here's where my memory and logic is letting me down. What is the link with Passover? I have it rolling around somewhere from early RE lessons I guess, that there is some link between Shrove Tuesday, Lent and Passover. Did Jesus go into the desert to prepare for Passover?
There is a similarity between Easter and Passover, the BBC website tells us,
"Passover can be called the Festival of Spring and was an agricultural festival which marked the beginning of the cycle of production and harvest during the time the Jews lived in ancient Palestine.
It symbolises hope and new life and the importance of starting afresh. "
Passover also takes place around the time of or not long after Easter.
Oh well, maybe the little bugs in my throat are cleaning my soul, I wonder how I'll know if it works?
Nothing new under the sun
2 years ago
5 comments:
Being a Catholic and going to a public high school on Ash Wednesday we were allowed to come to school late (with no note) but with the ashes on the forehead thingy. And nobody every said anything -- such good little Protestants they were.
When I was younger (in grade (primary) school) I used to give up candy for Lent. But Sunday wasn't actually Lent, I discovered, so you could eat candy on Sundays. Which I realize now was cheating. A wonder my grandmother or parents ever let me get away with that. I could try giving up food for Lent now and see if that would help. Which I'm sure it would. But than I'd feel sorry for myself and the rule wouldn't make it past the first week any way, so forget that.
We had pancakes! Everyone in the house seems to have different family traditions as to what go in/on them.
Eilish has 'tinned' mandarins and caster sugar.
Chris is on Atkins diet and wouldn't have anything! (Ponce)
Claire and Mikey have Jif lemon, caster sugar and golden syrup.
I like smothering mine in Nutella, Yummers!
simmi
I grew up Catholic, well, with a French-Manitoban Catholic mother and a atheistic Jewish father but still. When I was 16 I remember giving up playing the Ms. Pacman video game for Lent, that was tough because I loved Ms. Pacman. I still love it but it is hard to find now in the video arcades. We weren't allowed to have meat on Good Friday and since no one in my family liked fish, we had macaroni and cheese. My mother apparently grew up with no meat every Friday. Easier if you like fish I imagine.
My father, Jewish atheist, often ate bacon but when he felt like an argument, yelled at my mother for giving him bacon.
I never celebrated Shrove Tuesday until I moved here and I went over to my AngloCatholic friends house and wondered why the heck we were having pancakes for dinner.
Thank-you, thank-you person who sent me the following information between the links between jewish and Christian festivals.
The Jewish liturgical year is not simply the basis for Jewish holidays, but for the Christian movable feasts as well—those annual holidays that do not fall on a fixed date but vary according to astronomical occurrences.
The celebration of Passover took place just before the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, and the two holidays have been entwined from the beginning—the word Pasch, originally meaning Passover, came to mean Easter as well.
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/movablefeasts1.html
I knew I wasn't hallucinating. Well, ok I was, just not about this as it happens.
We had our pancakes, they turned out plendidly and in the end we did have lemon and splenda on them and that was really yummy too. Tho had we had some Nutella that would have been a different story...
Chris is on the Atkins diet?????
He has no fat !!!!!!
You know what Chris is like!! He puts on a couple of pounds then asks me (ME!) if his arse looks fat, has a Gay panic and goes on Atkins for a fortnight!
Simmi
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