Unless you were born into an Irish family and raised Catholic, there’s a high chance that you were never made to partake in the arduous task of lent before. This year, after many years of being absent from the lent club, I have given up alcohol. It has raised a few eyebrows and some muttered “I didn’t know you were THAT religious”comments; a look of horror on their face as they scuttle off with a beer containing alcohol in hand.

If you are unaware as to what exactly lent is, in a nutshell it is essentially Christians praying a lot, and depriving themselves of selected indulgences for the six weeks in the run up to Easter Sunday. The Catholic Church likes to remind us on a daily basis and particularly at lent that Jesus gave his life for us, just in case we’d forgotten. People take it as a time of self discovery and reflection. However, if you’re an Irish Catholic child, no one wants to sit down and talk metaphors and spirituality with you, when you ask a question about why you have to give up chocolate for six weeks, the answer is “because I said so” or “Jesus gave his life for you and you question why you have to give up chocolate”.

Here is my cousin playing Jesus. I’ve heard he was so believable, that people were disorientated after his performance and thought they were in the Holy land; when in fact they were still in Clontarf.

To me and probably every other Irish child who endured it, lent holds very negative connotations in my memory. Every adult that you knew and even the random old ones in the shops that you didn’t know would interrogate you in the run up to lent. The conversations always went the same way, pressure and questions followed by guilt:

Old lady: “Oh is that Katie, she’s gone fierce big. Hello Katie, you’ve gone so big, jes who is she like, I’m not sure who’s she like. Katie tell me this now, what are you giving up for lent? You’re such a great girl doing lent.”

Me: “cabbage”

Old lady: (now unimpressed, but still smiling) ” oh now you cheeky thing, you can’t give up cabbage. You have to sacrifice something that you really love like chocolate, sweets, biscuits and happiness. Just like our Lord gave up his life. Or was it his son….or was it both……..?”

Me: “I actually really love cabba….”

Old lady: “you do know if you’re lying about really loving cabbage baby Jesus will know and you’ll have to go to confession? Why don’t you just give up sweets and that will be a solid choice. Our Lord knows that we all enjoy a sweet!”

Me: (THINKING: which is worse, having to go sit in a wooden box with that strange singing priest while I tell him I actually don’t really love cabbage or just give up sweets?) “sweets it is!”

Old lady: “my work here is done! Remember, God is with you every step of the way! Say hello to your granny for me!”

After you had chosen what you would give it up, which would usually be chocolate, biscuits, sweets, crisps or a combination. (The real hard core kids would give them all up and only have digestives for six weeks.) Then you’d made you choice the bargain plea would begin with your mam, under what circumstances were you allowed to break lent for. Everything would have to be taken into consideration – how many birthday parties would be during lent, did I like the person or did I just want to go so I could eat sweets at their house, whether St. Patrick’s day fell during lent, a day of school and the possibilities of getting Sundays off. (I never got Sundays). There was deprivation led by over indulgence and longing for the next ‘day off’, not to mention the terrible practice of the ‘lent tin’.

I don’t know if this happened in every house, but in our house we had “lent tins”. This was preferably an empty tin of biscuits from Christmas, which you obtained in the weeks coming up to lent, decorated with stickers and a warning message written on top. This tin was in preparation for the adults who were fallen Christians and who had the cheek to offer you sweets, chocolate or biscuits during the fast. I would ask my mam to quickly take the temptations off me and put them in her handbag for my tin at home. By the end of the six weeks this tin would be a mess of warm sticky sweets, disfigured chocolate bars and stale, crumbled biscuits. Once Easter Sunday came you could eat whatever you wanted, and I certainly did – the recognition of gluttony as a deadly sin was obviously not part of lent in the Irish childhood.

How lent works when you’re a child is the terrifying lengths your imagination can go to. So when the devil is tempting you with a chocolate digestive and you try to convince yourself it’s grand because it’s a digestive and they’re the shittiest biscuit, your imagination begins to take over. With biscuit in hand, you begin to imagine that God is everywhere and that the little child of Prague acting like an elf on the shelf is your enemy, because he’ll be off telling God what you did once you take a bite! The fear of the all powerful and mighty trinity skulking around looking for naughty children breaking lent was enough to keep you on the straight and narrow. Kids being threatened by the guilt of sin instead of being encouraged and communicated with is never going to have successful longevity. The pressure was mainly from school with nuns and priests visiting your classroom attempting to instil some pre-lent fear.

The year that I was most successful with lent and the one that changed my life for the better, was the lent I gave up sugar in my tea. I had taken up tea a few years before and my sugar consumption had been getting progressively worse over the years. At eleven I was having three spoons of sugar in every cup. At that stage I was drinking at least three cups of tea a day and if I was with my granny it was probably up on ten plus, which equated to about thirty spoons of sugar! Luckily my Granny sat down with me before lent and suggested I give up sugar in my tea. I was horrified at the prospect. It would have been easier to give up anything else, but she told me a story of how she had done it before, so that sealed it for me. It was a tough six weeks and I didn’t even have any sweeteners, but I haven’t looked back since and have never had sugar in my tea again.

I can be nearly certain that I snuck some secret sweets with most Lent’s I partook in, apart from giving up sugar in my tea. I would eat that secret sweet, feel racked with guilt and head off to confession. All in an attempt to be absolved of my sin and thinking , “sure what’s the point, baby Jesus knows that I can’t be trusted now”. The vicious Catholic circle of guilt. The reason I stuck to giving up sugar in my tea and embraced that change was because my granny spoke to me about it and made me realise that it was something positive, not negative. Unlike the dreaded primary school teacher’s approach of shaking the Alive-O book at you, pointing at a picture of Jesus on the cross and insisting with raised voices you make your decision before the bell goes for lunch.

Putting all of my apprehensions and negative memories of lent aside, I decided this year to give up alcohol for the six weeks. Not because my primary school teacher threatened us with sin and hell, but because I wanted to do it for my own personal reflection. So with a Becks blue in hand (technically 0.05%) I will continue on for the next six weeks and hopefully not give into little Satan’s temptations.

#doingitforbabyj