Mardi Gras

Pancake Day was often a hunt for buried treasure

Today is Fat Tuesday, otherwise known as Pancake Day. For any Catholic Newfoundlander, that means emptying the larders — in theory anyway — of all fattening items like butter and eggs. In order to dispose of these items, we make pancakes.

Why? Because Lent starts tomorrow, Feb. 18, and we are supposed to observe a fast for 40 days until Holy Saturday, April 4.

We fast to remember the sacrifice Jesus made by getting nailed to a cross.

Why 40 days? Because Jesus fasted for 40 days in the desert one time.

Ah-ha. I know what you math people are saying. You are saying that you looked at your wall calendar and added up the days between Feb. 18 and April 4 and it came to 46 days. That’s because Sundays are a day of rest from work, and fasting is hard work. Ipso facto, we don’t fast on Sundays. (Note: although not officially noted in the Catholic dogma, cheating is accepted on St. Paddy’s Day, March 17.)

So for 40 days, with the exception of Sundays and St. Paddy’s Day, Catholics are supposed to fast. Now these days fasting doesn’t mean abstaining from food in general. Fasting, more or less, means giving up a vice, like smoking or soft drinks or copious amounts of salted potato chips. It could also mean giving up swearing or video games or gambling.

Basically, we reflect on something we partake in that is not good for us and a challenge to do without. Back in the early ’40s, my grandmother made my mother give up reading novels for Lent because they interfered with her school lessons. Now, my mother loved to read novels as much then as she does now. Imagine the tension.

One year in the late ’50s or early ’60s, my eldest sister, Anne — who loved to watch TV — gave up her favourite programs for Lent. My second sister, Gerry, although she wasn’t a TV watcher, decided this was a great idea and gave up the same thing. They both felt equally good about their Lenten obligations.

I usually try to give up chocolate for Lent. But of course, the more I think about not being able to have a Lindt Crème Brûlée bar, the more I want it, and if I make it through the week, on Sunday I end up putting in the equivalent of a chocolate drip that more or less negates my week of “fasting.”

Anyway after 46 days of Sunday-interrupted pseudo fasting, we Catholics will be at April 4, Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, when Jesus made a quick exit from the tomb. (Note: the date for which is determined by the first Sunday that follows the first full moon after the Spring Equinox).

To celebrate his rebirth, we gorge ourselves on chocolate things representing rebirth, mostly hens and their eggs, and rabbits, which of course reproduce t a rapid rate). Last Easter in France,

store windows were filled with chocolate bells (to ring out, celebrating Jesus’s resurrection), often covered in gold sprinkles and far, far outside of my budget.

Oh, and chocolate fish. Yes, fish. First I thought of the millions of eggs on the beach in Torbay, but then I learned that the reason Frenchmen eat chocolate fish at Easter has more to do with the proximity of Easter to April Fool’s Day (Poisson d’Avril) when children go about sticking paper fish on the backs of adults.

Here, of course, drug stores are full of chocolate hockey players, monster trucks and Hello Kittys. Most children don’t have a clue about the rebirth thing anymore.

Anyway, back to the pre-Lenten tradition of Pancake Day. Each pancake we eat on Shrove Tuesday contains a baked-in surprise. It could be a wedding band, button, holy medal, coin, safety pin or nail. Yes, you read right. Catholics bake safety pins and nails right into their children’s suppers, all in the name of observing religious tradition.

“In the fall of 1994, we moved to Ontario,” says my sister, Anne of TV Lenten fame.

“Our neighbours were much younger than us, with young children. Anyway, Pancake Day rolled around and I was busy gathering pins, buttons and, of course, coins. My new-parent neighbours were horrified. Although they had heard of Pancake Day, and some had attended pancake breakfasts, they could not believe anyone would … put small metal objects which pose a choking hazard to children in their food.”

So why aren’t scores of Catholic toddlers presenting at Emergency every Shrove Tuesday evening with box nails in their gullets?

Because they know to expect a trinket in the pancake. Before eating, they dig in with their fork or hands to find the prize which foretells your future occupation. In our house on Bell’s Turn, coins meant you would be well-off later in life. A holy medal indicated a life in the priesthood or nunnery. A safety pin or button meant you’d be a seamstress or tailor. A nail was for carpenters and a wedding band meant you’d be married.

During my surfing of the World Wide Web, however, I have learned that for some people it’s a button for a bachelor, a nickel for wealth, a penny for a pauper and a nail for death.

Luckily, our mother didn’t do pennies — the copper turned green in the batter — or nails. It also says a piece of string means you’ll be a fisherman or marry one. I never got string in any of my pancakes. Nor did I marry a fisherman. My friend Barbara married a fisherman named Cyril. Maybe she got a piece of string in a pancake.

My brother John claims he got jacks in his pancakes. My British-born, Ontario-raised husband thinks we’re all crazy.

“The idea of cooking things into your food is so foreign to me,” he says. “It’s like putting sand in your bed sheets. Why would you do it?” “Mom always boiled the items to go in the pancakes in a little saucepan on the stove,” adds my sister, Anne. “At least if we choked we wouldn’t need a tetanus shot. I used to do the same, but nowadays, I just wrap the coins in tin foil. I seem to have gravitated from all the other items to money only. Everyone looks for the toonie.”

Money was always the soughtafter item. My sister Marie remembers the excitement of being the lucky one to find a dime, but says, thinking back, the fun was more in the occasion than the trinket.

“I remember getting buttons and things, but the most exciting was money … a nickel or a dime,” says Marie. “I don’t know if we ever got a quarter, (but) my memories are more feelings — how fun it was to find something and do the show and tell. And, of course, Mom made the best pancakes. To have pancakes for supper was the major treat. … Pancakes were exciting and different and tasty and sweet and fun. Sort of like Cracker Jacks with the little prize. Didn’t take much to make us happy.”