Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday To Go
The theme this year is moveable holidays and observances, focusing on Western Christianity but certainly taking from other faiths as needed. And to start, might as well go with the obvious.
Day 1: Ash Wednesday
Easter is probably the best known moveable holiday on the Western Christian calendar, and by being moveable it makes all of the other holidays associated with it moveable too. Which is really pretty helpful if you're trying to write about 40 moveable holidays and observances.
Anyway, Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the 40 day period where people prepare themselves to celebrate Easter. The day itself is said to be a day of prayer, fasting, and repentance. Fasting can take a few forms, from fasting during the day and having a light evening meal to having one full meal and two smaller meals which together don't add up to a second full meal.
Repentance is signified by the ashes; there are several examples in the Old Testament of the use of ashes to signify a person's repentance for their sins (there's also the donning of sackcloth rather than regular clothes, giving us "sackcloth and ashes"). Covering oneself in ashes as a public penance started to fall out of favor in the first millennium AD, with the practice of taking ashes on Ash Wednesday starting as early as the 8th century (though as the strewing of ashes on the head rather than the cross we get today).
Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter, and can occur between February 4 and March 10. The year 2096 will be the first time that Ash Wednesday will occur on February 29, so mark your calendars accordingly.
Apart from the religious significance, Ash Wednesday is also National No Smoking Day in Ireland, due to the connection of smoking and ashes, and as a way to get people to think of giving up smoking for Lent.
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