What Is Lent, and How Does a Family Keep It?

Most of us were handed Christmas and Easter and nothing in between. Lent is the forty days before Easter, one of the oldest observances on the Christian calendar, and the season a great many families were never taught. Here is what it is, where it came from, what giving something up is actually for, and a version of it a house with small children can genuinely keep.

What Lent Actually Is

Lent is the season of preparation that leads up to Easter. Pew Research Center describes it plainly as the period from Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday, the day before Easter.

Writing for Christian History, Ted Olsen puts the purpose this way: "self-examination and penitence, demonstrated by self-denial, in preparation for Easter." He also notes that Lent "is one of the oldest observations on the Christian calendar," which surprises people who assume it is a medieval add-on.

The word itself is not in the Bible. Aaron Damiani, writing in Christianity Today, traces it to "an old Saxon word meaning 'spring'." It is a weather word that became a church word, which tells you something about how long people have been keeping this.

The dates move every year, because Easter moves. For 2027, Easter Sunday falls on March 28. That puts Ash Wednesday on February 10, 2027, with the season running through Holy Saturday on March 27. Palm Sunday is March 21 and Good Friday is March 26.

Eastern Orthodox churches calculate Easter differently, so in most years their Pascha lands on a different Sunday, sometimes several weeks later. If you have Orthodox friends, their Lent and yours will not line up, and neither of you is doing it wrong.

Where the Forty Days Came From

The number is borrowed. Israel wandered forty years. Moses was on the mountain forty days. Elijah walked forty days to Horeb. And then this:

The season did not arrive all at once. Olsen notes that Irenaeus of Lyons, who died around the year 200, wrote of a preparatory season "in the earliest days of the church," but that "back then it lasted only two or three days, not the 40 observed today."

By 325, the Council of Nicaea was discussing a forty-day Lenten fast, referenced in its fifth canon. Olsen adds an honest caveat that a lot of confident articles leave out: "it's unclear whether its original intent was just for new Christians preparing for Baptism, but it soon encompassed the whole Church." The festal letter of Athanasius in 330 shows the forty-day fast before Easter already in practice.

How those forty days were counted varied by region. Olsen records that in the East people fasted only on weekdays, while the western season was a week shorter but included Saturdays. In both places the fast itself was severe: one meal a day, taken near evening, with no meat, fish, or animal products.

The shape of the season is ancient. The details have always been local. That is worth knowing before anyone tells you there is one correct way to do it.

Why the Calendar Says Forty-Six

Count the days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday in 2027 and you get forty-six, not forty. Six of them are Sundays.

Sundays are feast days. Every Sunday is a small Easter, and the church has never counted them as fast days. Olsen reports that until the 600s Lent began on Quadragesima, meaning Fortieth, Sunday, and that Gregory the Great moved the start to a Wednesday "to secure the exact number of 40 days in Lent, not counting Sundays, which were feast days." That Wednesday is the one we now call Ash Wednesday.

Gregory is also credited with the ashes themselves, marking foreheads with the old sign of repentance and mortality:

There is a practical mercy buried in that bit of calendar trivia, and families almost never hear it. If you gave up sweets and your daughter has cake at a birthday party on a Sunday, nothing has been broken. Sunday was never part of the fast.

What Giving Something Up Is Actually For

This is where Lent most often goes wrong. Treated as a spiritual diet, it becomes a six week test of willpower that says nothing about God and a great deal about our appetite for self-improvement. Jesus was specific about the danger:

Notice what he does not say. He does not say stop fasting. He says when you fast, and then tells you to hide it. The practice is assumed. The audience is the problem.

Isaiah puts the other half of it bluntly, in a passage worth reading aloud before anyone gives up chocolate:

Which is why the tradition has always carried three strands together, not one. Damiani names them as prayer, fasting, and generosity. Give something up, take something up, and give something away. Remove the first and you have a diet. Remove the third and you have a private discipline that costs no one anything.

And none of it earns anything. Damiani quotes Dallas Willard's line, the best single sentence on the subject: "Grace is not opposed to effort, but is opposed to earning." Lent, he writes, "is a participation in God's life, not an entrance fee to heaven." Keep it perfectly and you are not more loved on Easter morning than you were the day before it started. That is the point of the day it ends on.

If fasting is new territory, our guide to fasting and prayer for beginners covers the mechanics, including when fasting from food is not the right call.

Is Lent a Catholic Thing?

It is kept by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians, and also, as Damiani writes, "by most historic Protestant denominations, because it is a mere Christian practice belonging to all who follow Jesus."

The numbers say most Americans skip it. In a LifeWay Research survey of 1,000 US adults conducted from September 27 to October 1, 2016, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent, 76 percent said they do not typically observe Lent. Catholics were most likely to keep it at 61 percent, followed by those with evangelical beliefs at 28 percent and Protestants at 20 percent. Among people attending church at least monthly, the split widened sharply: 82 percent of Catholics and 30 percent of Protestants.

Pew Research Center's survey of 12,693 US adults, fielded February 13 to 25, 2024, found that 21 percent of American adults say they fast for certain periods during holy times. Four in ten Catholics said so, along with 34 percent of Black Protestants, 16 percent of White evangelical Protestants and 7 percent of White nonevangelical Protestants. In an earlier Pew survey in 2015, 47 percent of Catholics said they had given something up or done something extra for Lent in the previous year.

How strictly the fast is kept also varies enormously by tradition. Olsen notes that the rules relaxed steadily in the West over the centuries, and that in 1966 the Roman Catholic church restricted required fast days to Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, while Eastern Orthodox practice remains considerably stricter.

Sincere Christians land in very different places here, from the full traditional fast to not marking the season at all, and the New Testament nowhere commands a forty-day Lent. Nobody is obliged to do this, and nobody who does it is being legalistic by definition. It is a gift on offer, not a rule.

Keeping It With Young Children

The version that survives contact with a real family is smaller than the version in most articles. A few things that hold up:

One thing each, chosen by the person giving it up. An imposed fast is a punishment. A chosen one is a discipline. Let a six-year-old pick, and accept that the first choice may be a food they never eat anyway.

Make it visible. Forty is an abstraction to a young child. A paper chain with forty links, one torn off a day, is not. Neither is a jar that fills with coins across the season. Children remember the object long after they have forgotten anything you explained.

Keep the giving away strand. Families drop this one first and children enjoy it most. Pick a destination in week one, let them choose it, and put the jar where they will see it.

Do not attach it to a child's body. Fasting from food is adult territory, and framing any of this around weight, size, or eating less is a line worth refusing to cross. Children can give up a screen, a treat, a habit, or a possession they hand on. For more on the screen version of that, our post on a grace first approach to screen time may be more useful than a Lent rule.

Attach the reading to something already happening. Dinner or bedtime. Lent plans fail for the same reason Advent plans fail: they need a slot in the evening that was never free. More on that in family devotions that do not feel forced.

Tell them why the eggs matter. Here is a piece of history children love. Eggs were among the foods forbidden during the fast. Anthony McRoy, writing in Christian History, notes that the Council in Trullo in 692 required abstinence "from eggs and cheese," and that Thomas Aquinas later recorded the Lenten fast as prohibiting "even eggs and milk foods." Since hens went on laying all through Lent and eggs keep far better than milk or meat, a surplus of them was waiting by Easter morning. That is where the Easter egg comes from. It is not decoration. It is the fast ending.

A Realistic Plan for Lent 2027

Before Ash Wednesday. One conversation, ten minutes. Each person names what they are giving up and what they are taking up, and you pick the jar's destination. Write it on a card and stick it to the fridge, because by week three nobody will remember what they said.

Ash Wednesday, February 10. If your church holds a service, go. If it does not, read Joel 2:12-13 at dinner and say one sentence of prayer. The season starts quietly either way.

The weeks between. Three or four minutes a day is a complete practice: a few verses and one sentence of prayer. If you want a spine for the reading, walk slowly through one Gospel and let Holy Week arrive where the Gospel arrives there.

Sundays. Off. Feast days. Make something good for dinner and do not feel clever about it.

Palm Sunday, March 21 through Good Friday, March 26. This is the week the season was built for, and it is the one most families rush. Slow down rather than adding to it.

Easter Sunday, March 28. Break the fast properly. Whatever was given up comes back on the table, and someone says out loud why.

You will forget. Some week in early March the whole thing will lapse for four days and you will notice on a Saturday. Start again on the Sunday. Six weeks is long enough to fail in, which is why the tradition made it six weeks and not six days. Repair is not the exception to the practice, it is the practice. If prayer has gone dry in the middle of it, how to pray when you do not feel like it sits exactly there.

If your family already keeps Advent, you know the shape of this. Lent is the longer, quieter sibling. More on the church year on our faith page.

Family Discussion Questions

• What is one thing in our week that we would genuinely miss, and what would we notice if it were gone for six weeks?
• Jesus says to hide your fasting. Why do you think that matters so much to him?
• Isaiah 58 ties fasting to feeding people. What is one thing our family could give away this year?
• What should we do when one of us forgets or gives up halfway?

The Bottom Line

Lent is the preparation before Easter, from Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday. In 2027 that is February 10 through March 27, with Easter on March 28. Forty days, because the six Sundays inside it are feast days and are not counted.

Three strands, not one: give something up, take something up, give something away. The fasting alone is a diet.

It earns nothing and it is not required. It is one of the oldest ways Christians have made room before Easter, and a family can keep it with a paper chain, a coin jar, and four minutes at dinner.

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