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Wait, that's a different clown. I digress.
Today, the Western church begins the season of Lent, known in Latin as Quadragesima ("forty days"). And yes, if you don't count the Sundays, the days starting with this day, going on six and a half weeks through Holy Saturday, it really does last for forty days, as is demonstrated by the convenient chart below (which you can tell was made in Europe because the week starts with Monday, which we all know is wrong ... but, that's another story).
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Of course, they really should abstain from meat on Fridays year round, or devise "an alternate form of penance." (Yeah, like that's gonna happen.)
In addition, every person between the age of eighteen and fifty-nine must fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. That means having only one full meal on those days, with each of the other two meals being a "light collation" (or in Yiddish, a "nosh"), which together do not add up to the full meal.
Oh, and no in-between meal snacks either. This presumes, of course, that there is a discernible end to the main meal and the beginning of the light collation. Personally, I never understood how that works. It's like someone rings a bell that says: "Okay, kids, the meal is over, the no-eating-between-meals begins!"
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People go to church on this day, even though it's not a holyday of obligation, if for no other reason, to be marked with ashes on their foreheads. The priest or deacon will say these (or similar?) words:
Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
(Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.)
Of course, not all those you see on the streets so marked are Catholic. The practice has long been popular with Anglicans and Lutherans, and has also become common among "Methodists, Moravians, Nazarenes, Independent Catholics, as well as by many from the Reformed faith."
Thank you, Wikipedia.
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Maybe what nobody knows won't hurt them, don't you think?
Or don't you?