>Lent is 40 days in length, but if you count from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday, you don't come to 40 if you include the Sundays. Every Sunday is a "little Easter.
Yes, interesting that point. My chocoholic daughter (then aged about seven) realised that the school's view of Lent was a little off the mark. She knew that Lent was 40 days and started to mark the number of days that she had decided to give up sweets on the calendar. It didn't take her long to realise that she was being fooled into a longer period of time than strictly necessary. It took a good trawl round relatives and friends before we found a Catholic priest who could confirm that you had to skip the Sundays. Perhaps our schools thought it was too complicated to explain that Sundays were a day off? I suspect a plot. We were never very good at Lent in my family, too many birthdays (including mine) fell in Lent and we regarded them as a "holiday" too.
My parents were strict observers of the old Friday fast day. Ont he way home from work, my mother would buy a joint of meat to eat cold over the weekend. She used to cook it on the Friday night, over the course of the evening the smell of cooking would fill the house ... just in time for a midnight feat as the clock struck twelve. She often had to go shopping again the next day. Once they were on an aeroplane (rare in those days before package holidays took off) on a Friday. They refused all food (most of us look for an excuse to refuse airline food, anyway) but then looked up and saw the Catholic priest in the next row tucking in. He smiled and pointed out that there was a "dispensation for travellers".
