It’s been quite a few days here in the Cayman Islands:

Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day.

I have already mentioned Ash and Valentine so I am going to concentrate on Fat Tuesday, also known as Shrove Tuesday and Mardi Gras.

It ends the Christian Season of Epiphany that starts with Three Kings Day. Then we have the sombre beginning of Lent that starts with Ash Wednesday.

In fact the Epiphany season is Carnival time and if you are in New Orleans during this period you will see lots of parades throughout the weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday (or in French Mardi Gras).

Shrove Tuesday takes it name from the practice of fattening yourself up by eating lots and lots of fatty pancakes, hence its substitute name, and the one I was brought up knowing – Pancake Day!

The expression “Shrove Tuesday” comes from the word shrive, meaning “absolve”.

Like Mardi Gras, it’s the day you eat as much as you can to prepare yourself to give up all these “pleasures” and fast for the forty days and forty nights of the Lenten Season.

It is a practice that has been around for centuries:

Ælfric of Eynsham’s “Ecclesiastical Institutes” from around 1000 AD states: “In the week immediately before Lent everyone shall go to his confessor and confess his deeds and the confessor shall so shrive him as he then may hear by his deeds what he is to do in the way of penance.

Why pancakes?

They symbolize four pillars of the Christian faith–eggs for creation, flour as the mainstay of the human diet, salt for wholesomeness and milk for purity.

Foods such as butter, eggs and fat are discouraged from being eaten during the Lenten season,

When I lived in England church bells used to ring out on Shrove Tuesday, “to call the faithful to confession before the solemn season of Lent” and for people to “begin frying their pancakes”.

That practice, however, was dying out long before I arrived here in the Cayman Islands due mainly to the Noise Abatement Society. It is almost impossible for church bells to ring under the number of decibels they managed to get instilled in English Law.

Mardi Gras, however, concentrates more on the carnival flavour with colourful street parades, dancing, and particularly the throwing of beads to ladies to bare their chests.

I well remember having my fortune told many moons ago by a young lady in New Orleans with the largest chest I have ever seen. I have to confess I cannot remember a thing she told me about my fortune except when the subject of Mardi Gras came up. She casually said she always got lots and lots of beads thrown to her!

I was dying to ask her whether this was before or after …….

What a thing to remember on Fat Tuesday!