Of course we know Lent begins tomorrow in the Roman Catholic Church, and the day before is often celebrated with a feast to get rid of all those fabulous foods we're denying ourselves until Easter. Thus Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) and Carnival ("Italian carnevale, alteration of earlier carnelevare, literally, removal of meat, from carne flesh (from Latin carn-, caro) + levare to remove, from Latin, to raise" per Merriam-Webster's). But what about the shroves?
Webster's has an fascinating explanation of the word shrove, related to confession of sins and freeing from guilt:
We wouldn't want to give the history of shrive short shrift, so here's the whole story. It began when the Latin verb scribere (meaning "to write") found its way onto the tongues of certain Germanic peoples who brought it to Britain in the early Middle Ages. Because it was often used for laying down directions or rules in writing, 8th-century Old English speakers used their form of the term, scrīfan, to mean "to prescribe or impose." The Church adopted scrīfan to refer to the act of assigning penance to sinners and, later, to hearing confession and administering absolution. Today shrift, the noun form of shrive, makes up half of short shrift, a phrase meaning "little or no consideration." Originally, short shrift was the barely adequate time for confession before an execution.
So Shrove Tuesday meant a day of confessing of sins. Which is curious, because when a Catholic refers to doing his "Easter duty," they usually mean going to Confession and receiving Communion during Lent, not before Lent begins. However, "Easter duty" is not a term of law in the church, and it's all somewhat complicated. The Church advises three things for a good Lent -- alms-giving, prayer, and fasting -- and while going for Reconciliation is not among those three, it is highly encouraged, especially for those who have not been in the booth in a while, and absolutely for those who bear mortal sins (in fact, they should never wait for Lent if they can help it).
What about Pancake Day?
Pancake Day brings me back to Will Cuppy, the late humorist and book reviewer, author of The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody and other tomes with irresistible titles like How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes and How to Become Extinct. Cuppy died before Decline and Fall became a national best-seller, and his publisher, being the greedy sort that they are, threw together a book based on Cuppy's short pieces and notes called How to Get from January to December. It took me years to track down a copy of this in the pre-Amazon days. The editor arranged the pieces in calendar format, so the reader could get a dose of Cuppy humor each day. Here, on the entry for February 3, I first encountered a mention of the holiday Pancake Day, and the even more obscure Collop Monday, as follows:
This is as good a time as any to start thinking about Collop Monday, so called from the old English custom of eating collops, or pieces of salted meat and eggs, as a sort of preparation for Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day, when everybody would switch to pancakes. After eating all the collops they could get, the boys of the village would go around singing the following song:
Shrovetide is near at hand
And I be come a shroving;Pray, dame, something--An apple or a dumpling.
Most of these boys grew up and became the ancestors of thousands of people alive today, and yet you wonder why things are the way they are.
Which leaves me to ask: If on Collop Monday and Pancake Day they ate up all the meat and eggs and fats, what did they eat during Lent in those days? So many filling edibles are made with these things. Now we're only asked to abstain from meat on Lenten Fridays and to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Sounds like our ancestors were starving but for odd bits of fish and whatever nuts they could get wangle.
Talk about penance. No wonder they sang such lousy songs.
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