The Liturgical Year
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free The Liturgical Year trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Christian calendar tells one story every twelve months. It opens in Advent, moves through Christmas, Lent and Easter, and settles into the long run of Sundays after Pentecost. Along the way it has shaped school terms, bank holidays, favourite foods and even everyday phrases. This quiz covers the seasons and their colours, the great feasts and the days around them, how the date of Easter is worked out, and the customs that grew up at home and in church. A good share of the questions look at days Methodists keep, from New Year services to anniversaries of the movement's early years. It suits church groups, confirmation classes, quiz nights and anyone curious about why the calendar looks the way it does. Every answer has a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Victor Hugo character is named for the Sunday after Easter, when the abandoned baby was found?
Quasimodo
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.
Q 02Which day before Lent is named from an old word for absolving sins and is celebrated with pancakes?
Shrove Tuesday
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.
Q 03Which phrase for a special occasion comes from church calendars that showed feasts in coloured ink?
Red-letter day
Red-letter day recalls medieval calendars that picked out feasts in bright ink, while ordinary dates stayed in black.
Q 04The word Lent comes from an Old English word that named which season of the year?
Spring
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.
Q 05Which feast, forty days after Christmas, falls on the same date as America's Groundhog Day?
Candlemas
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.
Q 06Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after which lunar event falling on or after 21 March?
A full moon
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.
Q 07Which day of Holy Week takes a name from the Latin for 'commandment' and recalls the Last Supper?
Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday comes from mandatum, the new commandment Jesus gave at the meal. Many churches also re-enact his washing of the disciples' feet.
Q 08Halloween is named as the evening before which Christian feast, kept in the West on 1 November?
All Saints' Day
All Saints' Day was once All Hallows' Day, so the evening before was All Hallows' Even, which Scots speakers shortened to Halloween.
Q 09The name Pentecost comes from a Greek word with which meaning, counting the days from Easter Sunday?
Fiftieth
Fiftieth is the literal sense of pentekoste, a word Greek-speaking Jews had used earlier for their own festival of Shavuot.
Q 10Which name, shared with a Shakespeare comedy, belongs to the last evening of the Christmas season?
Twelfth Night
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.
Q 11Which day opens Lent, 46 days before Easter, when worshippers receive a cross on the forehead?
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday is named for what the cross is drawn in: the burnt remains of branches blessed in church the year before.
Q 12Which day opens Holy Week by recalling Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey?
Palm Sunday
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.
Q 13On which day of Holy Week do Britons traditionally eat hot cross buns to recall the Crucifixion?
Good Friday
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.
Q 21Which Methodist anniversary on 24 May recalls a 1738 London meeting that changed the founder's life?
Aldersgate Day
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.
Q 22Which service, first held in London in 1755, do British Methodists keep early each New Year?
Covenant Renewal
Covenant Renewal was adapted from the writings of a Puritan, Richard Alleine, and some American Methodists hold it on New Year's Eve instead.
Q 23Which vigil do Methodists hold late on New Year's Eve, a custom their founder adopted in 1740?
Watchnight
Q 14Which feast on 6 January celebrates the Magi bringing gifts to the infant Jesus?
Epiphany
Epiphany means something different in the East, where churches use the feast to celebrate only the baptism of Jesus.
Q 15Which older English name do British Anglicans and Methodists use for the feast of Pentecost?
Whitsun
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.
Q 16Which colour may clergy wear on Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, in place of purple?
Rose
Rose lightens a penitential season at its midpoint, and the same shade returns on Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent.
Q 17The name Advent, for the four weeks before Christmas, comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Coming
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.
Q 18Lent's forty days echo the time Jesus spent fasting in which setting before starting to preach?
In the desert
In the desert is where three Gospels place the forty days, and in Matthew the fast ends with Satan tempting Jesus three times.
Q 19Protestants in which country began the Advent calendar, counting down the days to Christmas?
Germany
Germany also gave the custom its name, Adventskalender, before it spread beyond the churches that began it.
Q 20Which fruit forms the base of a Christingle, standing for the world in the candlelit service?
An orange
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.
Watchnight follows the lead of an older Protestant church that began holding 'watch' services in 1733, seven years before Methodists took them up.
Q 24Which early-October observance of Christian unity did a Presbyterian congregation begin in 1933?
World Communion Sunday
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.
Q 25Which 1700s hymn writer wrote the carol about herald angels that is sung to a Mendelssohn tune?
Charles Wesley
Charles Wesley wrote the carol in 1739, and his fellow evangelist George Whitefield later reworked its opening lines into the form sung at Christmas.
Q 26In the three-year Revised Common Lectionary, which Gospel supplies most Sunday readings in Year B?
Mark
Mark is much shorter than Matthew or Luke, so Year B is the one that borrows extra Sundays from John.
Q 27What are the altar, pulpit and lectern hangings that change colour with the church seasons called?
Paraments
Paraments comes from a Latin word for adornment, and the term also covered the hangings of a royal room of state.
Q 28Which colour do Western churches use in Ordinary Time, the longest season of the church year?
Green
Green covers 33 or 34 weeks of the calendar, and the last of them ends just before Advent begins.
Q 29Which feast, made universal by Pope John XXII, falls one week after Pentecost in Western churches?
Trinity Sunday
Trinity Sunday was already popular in England, perhaps because Thomas Becket was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on that day.
Q 30Which mountaintop event do many Methodists celebrate on the last Sunday before Lent begins?
The Transfiguration
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.