Pancake Day, Shrove Tuesday
Pancake Day also known as Shrove Tuesday is the final day of Shrovetide, marking the end of pre-Lent. Lent begins the following day with Ash Wednesday. Let’s take a look at the festival itself. Christians believe that the 40 days before Easter (called Lent) mark the time that Jesus spent fasting in the desert. Traditionally, this time was spent praying and fasting, which meant not eating a range of foods including meat, eggs, fats and milk.The word ‘shrove’ comes from a Roman Catholic practice. To ‘shrive’ meant going to confess your sins and being absolved by a priest. In the past, a ‘shriving’ bell was rung on Shrove Tuesday to call people to church to confess their sins before lent began.As well as not eating ‘luxury’ foods, during Lent faithful Christians were also expected to give up fun activities, like dancing and playing football. Because of this, the days leading up to Lent (known as ‘Shrovetide’) were a time for celebrating before the strict rules started. Children would go ‘Shroving’ or ‘Lent-crocking’ on Shrove Tuesday, which meant knocking on their neighbours’ doors and singing:We be come a-shroving,For a piece of pancake,Or a bite of bacon,Or a little truckle of cheeseOf your own making.Sometimes they would even bring pieces of broken pottery or stones with them to throw at people who refused to give them anything!A tradition that still exists today is the pancake race. Legend says that it all started when a woman heard the shriving bell calling people to church on Shrove Tuesday while she was making pancakes – and she ran to the church still in her apron with her frying pan! We don’t know whether this story is true, but we think that the first races happened in about 1445.Like Easter, Shrove Tuesday is on a different date each year because it is calculated using the cycles of the moon, rather being on a calendar date. While this seems very confusing, in the early days of Christianity in Britain it was even more complicated.Before the 7th century, there were two ways to work out the date for Easter. One way came from Roman missionaries, and the other came from the Irish (or Celtic) tradition. Both methods used cycles of the moon, but were worked out differently, meaning that there were two different dates for Easter every year!This was very confusing for early Christians, who had to choose which one to follow. So, in AD 664, there was a meeting at Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire between religious leaders in England, called the Synod of Whitby. They decided that from then on, the Roman method would be used – and it is still used by the Church of England to work out the dates for Easter and Shrove Tuesday today.Before Lent could begin, all of the foods people couldn’t eat while fasting needed to be removed from the house so that they wouldn’t be tempted to break the rules. And the best way to do that was to eat these foods during Shrovetide.Meats like bacon would be eaten up on ‘Collop Monday’ (a collop is a thin slice of meat), two days before the start of Lent. On Shrove Tuesday, eggs, butter and fat were used up – and one of the easiest ways to do this was to make pancakes or fritters. And they're so delicious, people still enjoy t
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