50 Fun Facts About The Liturgical Year

Which Victor Hugo character is named for the Sunday after Easter, when the abandoned baby was found?

Quasimodo is left on the foundlings' bed at Notre-Dame on Quasimodo Sunday, and the priest Claude Frollo adopts him and names him after the day.

Which day before Lent is named from an old word for absolving sins and is celebrated with pancakes?

Shrove Tuesday comes from shrive, to absolve after confession. The pancakes used up the eggs, milk and butter that people gave up for the fast.

Which phrase for a special occasion comes from church calendars that showed feasts in coloured ink?

Red-letter day recalls medieval calendars that picked out feasts in bright ink, while ordinary dates stayed in black.

The word Lent comes from an Old English word that named which season of the year?

Spring is what the Old English word meant, literally the lengthening of the daylight hours. Only English gave the word a church sense; Dutch lente names nothing but the season.

Which feast, forty days after Christmas, falls on the same date as America's Groundhog Day?

Candlemas falls on 2 February and recalls the infant Jesus being presented in the Temple. Old weather lore said a clear sky that day meant a longer winter.

Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after which lunar event falling on or after 21 March?

A full moon on or after 21 March fixes the date, which is why Easter Sunday can land anywhere from 22 March to 25 April.

Which day of Holy Week takes a name from the Latin for 'commandment' and recalls the Last Supper?

Maundy Thursday comes from mandatum, the new commandment Jesus gave at the meal. Many churches also re-enact his washing of the disciples' feet.

Halloween is named as the evening before which Christian feast, kept in the West on 1 November?

All Saints' Day was once All Hallows' Day, so the evening before was All Hallows' Even, which Scots speakers shortened to Halloween.

The name Pentecost comes from a Greek word with which meaning, counting the days from Easter Sunday?

Fiftieth is the literal sense of pentekoste, a word Greek-speaking Jews had used earlier for their own festival of Shavuot.

Which name, shared with a Shakespeare comedy, belongs to the last evening of the Christmas season?

Twelfth Night ends the twelve days that begin on Christmas Day. Its customs include chalking the door, house blessings and wassailing apple trees in hope of a rich harvest.

Which day opens Lent, 46 days before Easter, when worshippers receive a cross on the forehead?

Ash Wednesday is named for what the cross is drawn in: the burnt remains of branches blessed in church the year before.

Which day opens Holy Week by recalling Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey?

Palm Sunday is kept with blessed branches and processions. The donkey signalled an arrival in peace, where a conqueror would have ridden a war horse.

On which day of Holy Week do Britons traditionally eat hot cross buns to recall the Crucifixion?

Good Friday was one of the few occasions when a 1592 London decree let bakers sell spiced buns at all, along with Christmas and burials.

Which feast on 6 January celebrates the Magi bringing gifts to the infant Jesus?

Epiphany means something different in the East, where churches use the feast to celebrate only the baptism of Jesus.

Which older English name do British Anglicans and Methodists use for the feast of Pentecost?

Whitsun once gave Britain a day off: Whit Monday was a bank holiday for about a century, until a fixed holiday on the last Monday in May took its place.

Which colour may clergy wear on Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, in place of purple?

Rose lightens a penitential season at its midpoint, and the same shade returns on Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent.

The name Advent, for the four weeks before Christmas, comes from a Latin word meaning what?

Coming is the sense of the Latin adventus, which first referred to Christ's return at the end of time, not to the birth at Bethlehem.

Lent's forty days echo the time Jesus spent fasting in which setting before starting to preach?

In the desert is where three Gospels place the forty days, and in Matthew the fast ends with Satan tempting Jesus three times.

Protestants in which country began the Advent calendar, counting down the days to Christmas?

Germany also gave the custom its name, Adventskalender, before it spread beyond the churches that began it.

Which fruit forms the base of a Christingle, standing for the world in the candlelit service?

An orange holds the candle, yet the first Christingle in 1747 was only a ribbon-wrapped candle, and nobody knows when the fruit joined it.

Which Methodist anniversary on 24 May recalls a 1738 London meeting that changed the founder's life?

Aldersgate Day is named for the London street where the founder, heavy-hearted, reluctantly joined an evening meeting and came away assured of his faith.

Which service, first held in London in 1755, do British Methodists keep early each New Year?

Covenant Renewal was adapted from the writings of a Puritan, Richard Alleine, and some American Methodists hold it on New Year's Eve instead.

Which vigil do Methodists hold late on New Year's Eve, a custom their founder adopted in 1740?

Watchnight follows the lead of an older Protestant church that began holding 'watch' services in 1733, seven years before Methodists took them up.

Which early-October observance of Christian unity did a Presbyterian congregation begin in 1933?

World Communion Sunday spread from one congregation to its whole denomination by 1936, and America's Federal Council of Churches took it up in 1940.

Which 1700s hymn writer wrote the carol about herald angels that is sung to a Mendelssohn tune?

Charles Wesley wrote the carol in 1739, and his fellow evangelist George Whitefield later reworked its opening lines into the form sung at Christmas.

In the three-year Revised Common Lectionary, which Gospel supplies most Sunday readings in Year B?

Mark is much shorter than Matthew or Luke, so Year B is the one that borrows extra Sundays from John.

What are the altar, pulpit and lectern hangings that change colour with the church seasons called?

Paraments comes from a Latin word for adornment, and the term also covered the hangings of a royal room of state.

Which colour do Western churches use in Ordinary Time, the longest season of the church year?

Green covers 33 or 34 weeks of the calendar, and the last of them ends just before Advent begins.

Which feast, made universal by Pope John XXII, falls one week after Pentecost in Western churches?

Trinity Sunday was already popular in England, perhaps because Thomas Becket was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on that day.

Which mountaintop event do many Methodists celebrate on the last Sunday before Lent begins?

The Transfiguration also has a fixed feast on 6 August, which a pope extended to the whole Western Church after the siege of Belgrade was lifted in 1456.

Orthodox churches often keep Easter later than the West because they use which older calendar?

Julian dates run 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, which the Catholic Church adopted in 1582 while most of Europe kept the old reckoning.

Which Jewish festival shares a name with Easter in most European languages?

Passover is Pesach in Hebrew, which became Pascha, and older English Bibles even used the word Easter to translate the Jewish feast.

Which feast on 25 March, nine months before Christmas, recalls the angel Gabriel's message to Mary?

The Annunciation also goes by Lady Day, and in England it was New Year's Day until 1752, when 1 January took over.

Which feast is traditionally kept on a Thursday, the fortieth day of the Easter season?

Ascension Day follows the forty days that Acts says the risen Jesus spent with his followers, though some churches have moved it to the next Sunday.

Which word of praise do many Western churches stop using throughout Lent and restore at Easter?

Alleluia is shut out of the Roman liturgy so firmly during the fast that people jokingly call it the A-word.

Gaudete Sunday in Advent and Laetare Sunday in Lent both take Latin names from a command to do what?

Rejoice is the first word of the opening chant at each day's Mass, and both Sundays give a break about midway through a penitential season.

Which first Christian martyr is remembered on 26 December, the day after Christmas?

Stephen shares the date with Boxing Day in Britain, Canada and Australia, while Eastern churches remember him a day later.

Reformation Day on 31 October recalls the Ninety-five Theses, posted in Wittenberg by which monk?

Martin Luther is said to have nailed them to the door of Wittenberg's castle church in 1517, the spark for the Protestant Reformation.

Which church-calendar term for a holy day like Easter titles Ernest Hemingway's Paris memoir?

A moveable feast follows Easter around the calendar, while a fixed one such as Christmas keeps the same date every year.

Which feast, created by Pope Pius XI in 1925, falls on the final Sunday of the Western church year?

Christ the King was first kept at the end of October, and it moved to the close of the church year only in 1970.

Which Lenten devotion follows fourteen images of Jesus's last day, echoing a route in Jerusalem?

Stations of the Cross imitates the Via Dolorosa, the processional route through Jerusalem's Old City from the Lions' Gate to Calvary.

Which British observance in mid-Lent began with processions to the church of one's baptism?

Mothering Sunday faded until Constance Adelaide Smith revived it from 1913, widening it to honour mothers at home as well as the church.

On Stir-up Sunday, the last before Advent, British cooks traditionally begin which festive food?

The pudding gave the day its nickname through a pun: the Prayer Book collect for that Sunday opens with the words 'Stir up'.

Which Latin name covers the span from the Last Supper liturgy to evening prayer on Easter Sunday?

Triduum simply means three days, and the span reaches its high point in the Easter Vigil.

Which Holy Week service, named from the Latin for darkness, sees candles put out one by one?

Tenebrae ends with the strepitus, a loud noise made in total darkness after the last light has gone.

Advent begins on the Sunday nearest the feast of which apostle, kept on 30 November?

Andrew's feast anchors the start of the Western church year, so Advent Sunday can fall anywhere from 27 November to 3 December.

What Latin name is given to the calculation that fixes the date of Easter each year?

Computus is short for computus paschalis, and by the end of the eighth century the word had come to mean the reckoning of time in general.

Great Lent in Eastern Orthodox churches begins on which day, celebrated in Greece by flying kites?

Clean Monday is named for purifying the body before the fast, and Greeks spend the public holiday on outings with shellfish and lagana, a flatbread baked only that day.

Which sixth-century monk invented Anno Domini dating while drawing up a table of Easter dates?

Dionysius Exiguus used the new year numbers only to label the Easters in his table, never to date a historical event.

Which name did American Methodists adopt in 1939 for the later months between Pentecost and Advent?

Kingdomtide was first proposed in 1937 for the whole stretch from Pentecost to Advent, but the idea met little support and Methodists took up only half of it.