There are Mardi Gras places and there are faschnaut places.  Mardi Gras places would include New Orleans, Venice and Rio de Janeiro.  Faschnaut places would include Allentown, Kutztown and Hazelton.  Faschnaut Day and Mardi Gras would seem as different as, say, Easton and The Big Easy, but they are, in fact, just different reactions to the same stimuli.  That stimuli would be Lent.

Lent is the great liturgical season of the Christian faith that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends with Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday.  Easter is not part of Lent, nor are the six Sundays during the Lenten period (also called the Shrovetide) counted among the forty days of Lent.  Thus, Lent actually spans forty-six days, not the forty we think of.

(The word Lent is from the Old English word lencten, which meant the season of Spring as well as the liturgical season.  Lencten is derived from the same root as the adjective long, as in the lengthening of days in the springtime.) 

The biblical accounts that inspired Lent are not directly connected to the accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Lent commemorates the time when Jesus, having just received his baptism from John the Baptist, retreated to the desert for forty days and forty nights of fasting and prayer.  It was at this time that Jesus endured the temptation of Satan.  Satan asked Jesus if He was starving why He would not just make bread from the stones on the ground.  Jesus replied, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”  Satan showed Jesus the glory of all the kingdoms of the world and offered them to Jesus if He would bow down and worship him.  But Jesus cast out Satan saying, “thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.”  After being comforted and nourished by angels, Jesus began His public ministry.

Despite the chronological gap between them in the Bible, by custom and tradition Lent and Easter are inseparably fixed together, and Lent prepares Christians for Easter in much the same way that Advent is a preparation for Christmas.  Christians make ready for Easter during Lent by prayer, penitence and almsgiving, as well as fasting and other forms of self-denial. (Use your imagination.)  People, being what they are, quickly calculated that if Lent was a (mandatory) time of fasting and self-denial, the period prior to Lent would be a logical time to engage in those particular pleasures that would soon be forbidden.

Different folks approached this opportunity in different ways.  The solid Germans, from whom so many of us in these parts are descended, would, on Shrove Tuesday, use up their sugar and lard by making a type of fried doughnut out of potato batter.  This doughnut, as we know, is called a faschnaut (or fastnacht) and it means “fast night.”   (The German word for Shrove Tuesday is Fastnachtsdienstag, meaning “Fast Night Tuesday.”)

Alternatively, people in some countries (mostly Latin) celebrate what is called Carnival.  The most famous celebration of Carnival in the US is New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, but there are many other celebrations around the world, including the Brazilian Carnival in Rio and the Italian Carnival in Venice.  Parades, parties, street celebrations, masquerades, public drunkenness and lewd, bawdy behavior typically characterize Carnival.  The word carnival comes from carn, meaning meat or flesh, and val meaning farewell.  Since the flesh being said goodbye to could mean both Kansas City rib eye and swimsuit model, carnival became a time devoted to enjoying now what you can’t have later.

The Germans chose to go wild with doughnuts, the Latins to running around naked until they pass out in a drunken stupor.  Those crazy Germans.

The carnival season is calculated differently in different cultures, beginning in some as early as Epiphany (January 6), but most commonly with Septuagesima Sunday, which is the third Sunday before Ash Wednesday.  Celebrations become more concentrated the closer the date gets to Ash Wednesday, culminating with Shrove Tuesday, also called Mardi Gras.

Mardi Gras is French for “Fat Tuesday.”  (Actually, “Tuesday Fat,” as Mardi means Tuesday (Mars Day) and gras means fat.  But what does fat mean in this context? Does it mean that this particular Tuesday is big, loud, boisterous and obnoxious?  It is all of those things, but that’s not what fat means here.  It actually means fat, as in animal fat.  As in lard. As in use it up today, cause Lent starts tomorrow.

Oddly enough, a traditional food for Mardi Gras is a sweet fried dumpling called a cenci. It’s made out of potato batter, fried in deep fat, and sprinkled with sugar.  It sounds delicious.  Now if we could only get them in Pennsylvania.