Ash Wednesday

So I come from a country that is about 80% Catholic, so odds are, if you meet a Brazilian, they're probably Catholic as well.

Of course, when you put so many Catholics together, you're going to get a wide spectrum of things -- the folks like my grandparents who go to mass at least once a week, the ones like my parents who go to service once in a while, and then the ones like me, who don't remember the last time they went to church where there wasn't a wedding involved.

Said that, even for the hard core Brazilian Catholics (and those are not nearly as hard core as regular American Catholics), there are a lot of things that American Catholics do, that we don't do... For starters, the whole thing with Lent and not eating meat. I had never heard of that in my life until I moved to the US. In Brazil, the "big" day where we can't eat meat is Good Friday. That's it. All the other Fridays in the year are fair game (bring on the churrasco!).

You can imagine my surprise, during my first year living in the US, when I was walking around the streets of Manhattan on my way to school and people had this black thing smack in the middle of their foreheads. I was intrigued -- what's going on? Some part of a cult?? Why do these people have that stuff on their foreheads???

Luckily I didn't point out to the first person I bumped into that they had a smudge on their face (I actually considered letting them know -- how could they not notice something that big?), it wasn't until I kept going and saw many others that I realized that it was there on purpose! (On purpose, but why??)

I think it was only the following year, when the phenomenon repeated, that I found out that it was for Ash Wednesday. As in you actually put ash on your forehead, for Ash Wednesday. No, it wasn't part of a cult, but something that Catholics do. (WHA??? But I'm Catholic and I never heard of that!)

To this day, I have no clue why exactly they smudge all that ash (but have yet to be interested enough to ask anyone). I still find it weird. The 80% of Brazilians that are Catholic do not put ash on their foreheads, or anywhere else on their body for that matter.

Don't get me wrong, ash Wednesday is a huge deal in Brazil. After all, it marks the official end of the Carnaval weekend, school will soon be back in session (damn!), and it's the day when the Samba Schools in Rio are judged, the winner is announced, and the two losers are bumped down to the 2nd division (no TV coverage for them, no one really cares about the 2nd division).

Most people don't come back to work until the following Monday though as they're busy traveling in the north of Brazil dancing and getting drunk to the Trio Eletricos.

But ashes on foreheads? Is still a foreign culture to me. I'll take Carnaval any day over ashes!