Ash Wednesday marks the first day of the Season of Lent in the Western Christian calendar and always occurs forty-six days before Easter (40 days if you don’t count Sundays). Thus, the holiday falls on a different date each year, because it is dictated by the date of Easter (it can fall anywhere between February 4th and March 10th). The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer — through prayer, penitence, alms-giving and self-denial-for the death (Good Friday) and resurrection of Jesus celebrated on Easter Sunday.

While Ash Wednesday is most strongly associated with the Roman Catholic Church, Lutherans, Episcopalians and a smattering of other Christian worshippers also observe the holiday. It derives its name from the ritual of placing a cross of ashes on the forehead of adherents as a symbol of penitence. The ashes are made from the burnt palm fronds used in the prior year’s Palm Sunday celebration.

According to the Bible, ashes were used in ancient times to express mourning and guilt for sins and personal shortcomings. In early Christianity, believers who had committed grave sins would perform a kind of public penance on Ash Wednesday, donning hair shirts while their local bishop sprinkled them with ashes made from the palms from the prior year. Then, while the faithful recited the Seven Penitential Psalms (smugly, I’d imagine), the penitents were turned out of the church and could not return until after Easter. When this ritual was gradually widened to include all believers, the hair shirt was abandoned in favor of the practice of abstaining from some sort of pleasurable activity or vice, such as eating chocolate, smoking cigarettes and having sex.

Unsurprisingly, The Roman Catholic Church takes Ash Wednesday very seriously. Thus, Catholics can look forward to a day of fasting, abstaining from meat and feeling even worse about themselves than they already do. The more laid back Anglican Church only really stresses fasting, and some of the really namby pamby denominations that observe the holiday only requires a day of repentance and reflection.

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