This magazine should reach you in time for Holy Week. That's the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday - the week that includes Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. No, it's not the week that includes Shrove Tuesday or Ash Wednesday - that was over a month ago, at the start of Lent! And it's not the week that includes Easter Saturday either, although a lot of people think it is. Easter Saturday, like Easter Monday, falls in the week after Easter - it's the day before Low Sunday.
A lot of days have special names, many of them long forgotten - how many of us could put a date to Lammas, Martinmas, Petertide or St Swithin's Day? This magazine is being collated on Lady Day - the Feast of the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas, when we commemorate the angel Gabriel's visit to Mary, the beginning of the Good News. Lady Day used also to be the first day of the year - in England, the calendar year only started in January after 1752 (the Swiss got there earlier, in 1573, and the Scots in 1600.)
Unlike Lady Day, which is always March 25, the days around Easter change their date from year to year, to match the date of Passover. Passover was the Jewish spring festival, commemorating the escape of Moses and the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, when God punished the Egyptians with the loss of their firstborn, but "passed over" the houses of the Israelites. It was celebrated at the full moon - and Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring.
The French call Easter "Pâques" - a word that goes back to the Hebrew word pasach, to pass over. In English (and German), the name of the most important festival of the Christian year commemorates a long-forgotten pagan goddess - Aurora, the goddess of spring, of light and the rising sun. It is an example of how the people who first responded to the Christian message clung on to old names, old festivals, old holy places, but Christianized them.
The forty-day fast that ends on Easter Eve is called Lent after the old English name for spring ("Lenz" in German is the season when the days lengthen). In Latin, the season was called Quadragesima, meaning forty (from which its French name "carême" comes).
The first day of Lent is Ash Wednesday. From about the eighth century, ashes were used at the liturgy on that day as a sign of sorrow and penitence. (The day before Lent, it was the custom to confess one's sins, to put oneself right with God, and to ask God's forgiveness - to be shriven: hence the name Shrove Tuesday. And to use up one's supply of eggs, in preparation for the Lenten fast - hence the alternative name, Pancake Day!)
Some of the Sundays in Lent have their own names. The third Sunday before Easter was called Refreshment Sunday - perhaps because the readings originally laid down for that day focused on rejoicing and relaxation, or on the Feeding of the Five Thousand. And it was also called Mothering Sunday, perhaps because of the custom of returning home on that day, and perhaps because another reading for that day, Gal. 4:26, spoke of the church, the Heavenly Jerusalem, as our mother.
Then the second Sunday before Easter is called Passion Sunday, when our thoughts turn to Jesus’ suffering on the Cross, and the Sunday immediately before Easter is Palm Sunday, when we recall Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The custom of blessing and distributing palms, and carrying them in procession, goes back as far as the fourth century.
During Holy Week we celebrate Maundy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper. "Maundy" comes from the Latin mandatum, a command - specifically Jesus' words in John 13:34: "I give you a new commandment - that you love one another as I have loved you." (The German "Gründonnerstag" perhaps comes from the name of the day in church Latin - day of forgiveness.) And Good Friday. Good only in the sense of being holy! (The German name, "Karfreitag" is much more eloquent - a day of sorrow (of "care", we would say in English).)
The Sunday after Easter is called Low Sunday in English - "Dominica in albis" in Latin, "the Sunday in white". Baptisms used to take place at Easter, and the newly baptized would wear their white baptismal robes for a week afterwards, before taking them off.
If Easter Saturday is the last day in the week between Easter and Low Sunday, then what is the day between Good Friday and Easter Day? The Prayer Book calls it by a name that removes all ambiguity. It is Easter Eve. The day when we await, and look forward to the commemoration of Easter, the event that changed the history of the world.
HD