The Treble Wore Trouble (The Liturgical Mysteries) - Plot & Excerpts
It was the day before Ash Wednesday and therefore (traditionally) a day of excess. Mardi Gras parades — the best ones — were held on Fat Tuesday. Drinking and debauching are the orders of the day as we gird our loins for forty days of fasting and prayer. Fasting and prayer have mostly fallen by the wayside, but the drinking and debauching have certainly been embraced, insofar as Mardi Gras goes.In the church we've managed to avoid the imputation of "fatness" by announcing that we choose to celebrate "Shrove Tuesday" instead: "shrove" from the verb "shrive," meaning "to grant absolution." A pancake on Shrove Tuesday would taste as sweet and make you just as fat. We eat pancakes just before Lent begins because, as severe and high-minded Christians, we eschew sugar, fat, flour, and eggs, items whose consumption is traditionally restricted during the penitential season, and so, ingest them in abundance on the day before. Sort of like a "last meal." One last sugar high.All this is historical trivia and has nothing whatsoever to do with what we actually do or why we do it.
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