It occurred to me earlier that today, being the day before Ash Wednesday, is perfect fodder for a blog that ostensibly concerns itself with national/cultural differences. As David Sedaris explores hilariously in his story "Six to Eight Black Men" (if you haven't, read it - preferably in private or people will stare as you laugh uncontrollably), holiday customs have much to say about our national differences.
Where the-day-before-Lent is concerned, nowhere is this more apparent then in Central Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Central PA was largely settled by Germans and, accordingly, maintains a number of German traditions. In addition to producing multiple types of potato salad and the best pretzels in the world (seriously, I've been to Germany and ours are better), these include the hallowed tradition of Fasnacht Day. What, you ask, quite rightly, is a fasnacht? For the uninitiated, which once upon a time included my grandmother, who hailed from the exotic land of non-German Pennsylvania, the fasnacht is a donut that looks something like this. Two fascinating things about Fasnacht Day: 1) In Pennsylvania Dutchland, donuts are donuts 364 days a year, adopting the name fasnacht, the name of southern Germany's carnival, only on Shrove Tuesday. 2) Most Pennsylvanians of German descent are Protestant, while giving up things for Lent is more popular among practicing Catholics, a paradox which calls into question the necessity of emptying one's kitchen of lard on a random day in February. But hey, let's not nitpick.
My only experience of a genuine Central European carnival happened in Prague in 2006. My friend Werner dragged me to Kino Aero in Žižkov. The Plastic People of the Universe were onstage. Fake meat was hanging from the ceiling - the name of the festival, Masopust, means, literally, something like "stop meat." Beer was flowing and the atmosphere was closer to what I imagine that of a New Orleans Mardi Gras to be, though I have never attended.
In London, Shrove Tuesday disappears into the ignominy of "Pancake Day". When I first heard of it, advertised a diner as "Pancake Week", I didn't connect it to Lent at all, suspecting it was akin to Arbor Day, International Book Day or similar...As with most British interpretations of feast days that have their roots in the Christian calendar, it feels oddly commercial and alienated from these sources. My local Waitrose went so far as to erect a special display of all the ingredients one would need to make pancakes. So much for emptying ones cupboards of comfort foods verboten during Lent - instead we were being encouraged to go out and buy them!
It's all quite Platonic, I suppose - there's the form of the thing, epitomized by Carnival in Venice or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and then all our little local attempts to participate, via a circle of fried bread, plastic sausage or humble flapjack. One wonders, increasingly, why we bother at all, particularly in nations firmly on the path to mass atheism. What earthly pleasures will we deny ourselves for the next 40 days to justify a day of gorging on circular pastries of one kind or another? It's kind of sad, actually...though a glance at the clock tells me its now over. And I haven't eaten a single fasnacht. What would my Grandfather, descendant of fasnacht-devotees, say.
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