50 Fun Facts About Shrove Tuesday

'Short shrift', today a curt brush-off, originally named the hurried confession granted to whom?

Condemned prisoners got a short shrift, a rushed confession before execution; shrift is the noun from shrive, the verb whose past tense gives Shrove Tuesday its name. Shakespeare's Richard III has the first printed use.

Which token in a Newfoundland Shrove Tuesday pancake foretells that its finder will become, or marry, a carpenter?

A nail means a carpenter, while a coin promises wealth: Newfoundland and Cape Breton families cook little tokens into the pancakes so children can read their futures.

Before today's trophy and cash, what prize traditionally awaited the winner of Olney's pancake race?

A kiss from the verger was the prize, collected at the door of St Peter and St Paul's after the dash from the Marketplace; the race was revived in 1948 and has been timed against a Kansas rival since 1950.

On Iceland's Bolludagur, the Monday before Shrove Tuesday, what do children do to their parents to earn cream buns?

Children spank them with a paper stick, decorated with coloured strips, chanting 'bolla, bolla, bolla!' until the buns appear; Iceland took the custom from Denmark and Norway in the 19th century.

Spanish towns close carnival on Ash Wednesday with a mock funeral, painted by Goya, for which creature?

A sardine, usually an effigy, is paraded and then set alight in the Entierro de la Sardina, a burial of the past so society can be reborn; Goya painted the Madrid version in the 1810s.

Which plastic-lemon juice brand, launched in 1956, marketed Shrove Tuesday from 1985 as its own 'Lemon Day'?

Jif ran the slogan 'Don't forget the pancakes on Jif Lemon Day' from 1985, and its squeezy yellow lemon, among the first blow-moulded food containers, became the standard pancake dressing beside a shaker of sugar.

What did the Fastelavn barrel that Danish children smash open for sweets, a custom from the 1500s, once hold?

A live cat was shut inside, and beating the barrel and chasing it out symbolised demolishing evil; the custom may have reached Copenhagen with Dutch immigrants in the reign of Christian II.

Which future king made Ashbourne's Shrovetide football 'Royal' in 1928 by starting play, and got a bloody nose?

Edward VIII, then heir to the throne, 'turned up' the ball in 1928 and took a bloody nose for it; Charles repeated the honour as heir in 2003, and the game runs over Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday.

The Guinness record pancake, 15 metres across and weighing 3 tonnes, was cooked in 1994 in which English town?

Rochdale's Co-operative Union cooked it on 13 August 1994, 15.01 m wide and 2.5 cm thick, and Guinness was still listing it as the largest ever made 20 years later.

In France, crêpes are the traditional dish of which 2 February feast, when a coin is held in one hand while flipping?

La Chandeleur, Candlemas, is France's crêpe day: flipping one while holding a gold coin in the other hand is said to bring a year of wealth, and a rhyme promises that crêpes at Candlemas bring a year of happiness.

Which US state's 'Dutch Country' fries fasnacht doughnuts on Fastnacht Day, its name for Shrove Tuesday?

Pennsylvania's Dutch counties around Lancaster, York and Berks eat fasnachts with butter or golden syrup; the doughnuts were a way to empty the pantry of the fat, sugar and butter that Lent forbade.

Finland's Laskiainen, its Shrove Tuesday, is usually described as a mid-winter festival of which activity?

Sledding down snow or ice tracks is the Laskiainen pastime, paired with pea soup with ham and a cream bun; the name may come from laskeutua, to descend, or laskea, to count the days to Easter.

Veilchendienstag, one German name for Shrove Tuesday, translates as the Tuesday of which flower?

Violet Tuesday sits beside Fastnachtsdienstag, Faschingsdienstag and Karnevalsdienstag as German names for the day, which brings fancy dress and a partial school holiday; Rose Monday comes the day before.

Historians trace the German carnival word Fastnacht to the verb 'fasten', which means what?

To fast is the root: Fastnacht is the eve of the fast, and historians around Werner Mezger refuted the rival folk etymologies, showing that the tradition itself is Christian.

Old English took 'shrive', the verb whose past tense names Shrove Tuesday, from a Latin word meaning what?

To write, Latin scribo, is the root: a priest 'prescribed' penance, so scrifan came to mean hearing confession, and its past tense shrove stuck to the Tuesday when the faithful were shriven before Lent.

Crempogau, thick buttermilk pancakes stacked and buttered, are a Shrove Tuesday tradition in which part of the UK?

Wales piles up crempogau, made with flour, buttermilk, eggs, vinegar and butter on a bakestone, for Shrove Tuesday and birthdays; the recipe is among the oldest in the country.

Which poet's 1930 'conversion poem', written after joining the Church of England, is titled Ash Wednesday?

T. S. Eliot wrote it during his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism, building on Dante's Purgatorio; its first section borrows Cavalcanti's line 'Because I do not hope to return' in Rossetti's translation.

Atherstone's Shrove Tuesday ball game recalls a 1199 match for a bag of gold put up by which monarch?

King John offered the gold for a match between Warwickshire and Leicestershire, which Warwickshire won; today the game runs along Long Street with two rules, stay on the street and kill nobody, and ends at 5 pm.

In 2017 Father Paddy Mooney of Glenamaddy, Ireland, offered Ash Wednesday ashes to commuters in what novel way?

Drive-through ashes let commuters receive them without leaving the car, and the parish added a box for drive-by prayer requests through Lent; clergy have been taking ashes out to public places since 2007.

Which Kansas town has raced Olney for the fastest pancake time every Shrove Tuesday since 1950?

Liberal's Jaycees issued the challenge in 1950 after seeing a magazine picture of the Olney women racing to church, and the two towns have compared their times across the ocean every Shrove Tuesday since.

Pancake-race rules shared by Olney and its Kansas twin require each runner to toss the pancake at which points?

At the start and the finish the pancake must be tossed, and runners wear an apron and scarf with a frying pan in hand; both towns time the dash and compare the results that day.

Collop Monday, the old English name for the day before Shrove Tuesday, takes its name from a dish of eggs and what?

Slices of bacon, the collops, were fried with eggs to use up the larder's last rashers before Lent; in east Cornwall the same day was Peasen Monday, for its pea soup.

Vastlapäev, marked with pea soup and whipped-cream buns, is Shrove Tuesday in which Baltic country?

Estonia's vastlakukkel is a cardamom bun with whipped cream, close to the Swedish semla, and children spend the day on the hills; Lithuania next door calls the day Užgavėnės.

Olney's women run from the Marketplace to the church of St Peter and St Paul over a course of roughly what length?

About 400 yards, 415 as the Kansas rival measures it, separates the Marketplace from the church door; local schoolchildren get a 20-yard version of their own.

The 1969 Roman Missal added which alternative formula, drawn from Mark 1:15, to be said as the ashes are imposed?

Repent, and believe in the Gospel was given first place in 1969, ahead of the older formula based on God's words to Adam and Eve after their sin; either may be said as the cross is traced on the forehead.

Quinquagesima, the old name for the Sunday that opens Shrovetide, is Latin for which ordinal number?

Fiftieth counts the days to Easter inclusively, Sunday to Sunday, and its sisters Sexagesima and Septuagesima, sixtieth and seventieth, named the two Sundays before it in the pre-1970 calendar.

Reforms after which 1960s council removed the three pre-Lent '-gesima' Sundays from the Roman calendar?

Vatican II's liturgical reforms folded those Sundays into Ordinary Time, so the Sunday before Shrove Tuesday is now simply the fourth to ninth Sunday of the year, depending on Easter's date.

Nickanan Night, the Cornish Shrove Monday also called Hall Monday, licensed local youths to do what after dusk?

Knock on doors and run off was the game, a 'nicky nicky nine doors' that may have given the night its name, along with carrying off any gear left lying about; the west of Cornwall called it roguery night.

Iceland's Shrove Tuesday is Sprengidagur, 'Bursting Day', when people fill up on split peas and what?

Salted meat and peas is the Bursting Day dinner, eaten until you can hold no more on the last day before the fast; cream buns come the day before and the children's costumed pranks the day after.

On Öskudagur, the first day of Lent in Iceland, costumed children sing for sweets and pin what onto unsuspecting backs?

Small bags of ashes are hung on the backs of passers-by by children who spend the rest of the day in costume singing for candy, which makes the day feel like an Icelandic Halloween.

At Lithuania's Užgavėnės, what happens to Morė, the effigy of winter, on the night before Ash Wednesday?

It is burned, and a staged fight follows in which Lašininis, 'Porky', standing for winter, loses to Kanapinis, the hempen man of spring; devils, witches and goats roam the villages in masks.

Which enclave of Detroit, lined with Polish bakeries, stages a Pączki Day parade every Shrove Tuesday?

Hamtramck's parade and bar parties mark Tłusty Wtorek, Fat Tuesday, because Polish Americans moved the pączki feast from Poland's Fat Thursday to the day before Lent; eating contests have followed.

Which North Yorkshire resort closes its foreshore every Shrove Tuesday so that everyone can skip with long ropes?

Scarborough's Skipping Day once used ropes from the harbour, and the town crier rang a pancake bell to start it; schools close early and a replica bell has hung in the town since 1996.

At Westminster School's Greaze, pupils scramble for a pancake tossed over a 20-foot bar; what is it reinforced with?

Horsehair holds the pancake together through a one-minute scrum; the pupil who ends up with the heaviest piece wins a gold sovereign and the Dean of Westminster begs a half-holiday for the school. The custom is recorded from 1753.

The Parliamentary Pancake Race, a relay for a brain-injury charity, has pitted MPs and peers against which third team?

Journalists of the press gallery, the Fourth Estate, make up the third relay team; the race was staged to raise awareness of Rehab UK's work with acquired brain injury, and a 2009 BBC headline ran 'Peers batter MPs in pancake race'.

How is a goal finally scored in Ashbourne's two-day Shrovetide game, whose goals stand three miles apart?

Tap it against a millstone three times in succession and the ball is 'goaled'; the scorer is chosen on the way, almost always a local, and the goals are the old Sturston and Clifton mill sites on Henmore Brook.

Sedgefield's Shrove Tuesday ball game starts at 1 pm when the ball is passed three times through what?

A bull ring in the village centre opens and closes the game: after the ball has been 'allied' at the goal, it must come back and pass through the ring again; it is an individual, not a team, contest.

Which 1835 law, by banning football on public roads, killed off most of England's Shrove Tuesday street games?

The Highway Act 1835 outlawed football on the highway, so the mob games mostly died out in the 19th century; Atherstone simply carried on, and its 2021 Covid cancellation was the first in the game's 821-year history.

In 2012 Brad Jolly set a Guinness record in Sydney by tossing a pancake how many times in one minute?

140 flips in 60 seconds is more than two a second, a feat Guinness was still calling unbeaten two years later; the highest single toss on record reached 9.47 metres in New York state in 2010.

On Weiberfastnacht, the Rhineland's women's carnival Thursday before Ash Wednesday, what do women snip off the men?

Their ties, a symbol of male status, are cut off with scissors and the men get a Bützchen, a peck on the cheek, in return; the day also sees women storm town halls, a takeover the Bonn district of Beuel has staged since 1824.

At the 1091 Council of Benevento, which pope ordered the ash rite already common in Western Europe extended to Rome?

Urban II made Rome catch up with a custom the rest of Western Europe had kept since the 10th century; soon afterwards the liturgical books began calling the day Feria Quarta Cinerum.

Catholic canon law binds the Ash Wednesday fast on adults from age 18 up to what age?

59 is the upper limit of the fast, one full meal plus two smaller ones that together do not equal it, and health must allow it; abstinence binds from the age of 14 under canon 1252.

Since the Gregorian calendar began in 1582, Ash Wednesday has never fallen on 29 February; when will it first?

2096 is the first leap-day Ash Wednesday of the Gregorian era, and only 2468, 2688, 2840 and 2992 follow it this millennium; the earliest possible Ash Wednesday, 4 February, last came in 1818.

Which English abbot's account from about the year 1000 shows ashes being 'strewn' on the head at the start of Lent?

Ælfric of Eynsham wrote of ashes strewn on the head, not the forehead cross that prevails now in English-speaking churches, and he did so before Rome itself adopted the rite in 1091.

In Alemannic dialect, the 'schmotzig' of Schmotziger Donnerstag, the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, means what?

Lard, or fat, is what schmotzig means there, so the day is 'Greasy Thursday', when the winter stores of lard and butter were eaten up; standard German schmutzig, 'dirty', is a false friend.

Which Prayer Book service, a recital of God's judgments on sinners, replaced the ashes in the Church of England?

The Commination, or Denouncing of God's Anger and Judgments against Sinners, came in with the first Prayer Book of the mid-16th century and laments that the old public penance at the start of Lent had lapsed.

Which university staged the 2012 Guinness record for the most people tossing pancakes at once, 890 of them?

Sheffield's students flipped in unison for the 890 record; on the same list Ashrita Furman and Bipin Larkin threw and caught 46 pancakes in a minute, and a marathon was run in 3 h 2 min while flipping one.

Alnwick's Shrovetide match ends with the ball thrown into the River Aln; who gets to keep it?

Whoever swims over to fetch it keeps the ball, the last act of Scoring the Hales, a match between the parishes of St Michael and St Paul first recorded in 1762 and won by the first side to two 'hales'.

In parts of Maryland, the fasnacht doughnuts fried for Shrove Tuesday go by what local name?

Kinklings is the Maryland name for the same pantry-clearing doughnuts, sold there only in bakeries on Shrove Tuesday, while across the state line most eastern Pennsylvania supermarket chains stock fasnachts with butter or golden syrup.

Shrove Tuesday was once a British 'half-holiday' that began with the ringing of a church bell at what hour?

11 am was when the bell sent workers home and, in many parishes, told cooks to start frying; in Olney the same 'shriving bell' is the one the legendary housewife answered with her pan still in hand.