What is lent?
 
From Wikipedia
"Lent, in Catholic tradition, is the period of the liturgical year leading up to Easter. The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer — through prayer, penitence, almsgiving and self-denial — for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, which recalls the events linked to the Passion of Christ and culminates in Easter, the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Conventionally, it is described as being forty days long, though different denominations calculate the forty days differently. The forty days represent the time that, according to the Bible, Jesus spent in the desert before the beginning of his public ministry, where he endured temptation by Satan."
 
Most churches count the period of lent differently, usually it's 40 days long but some don't count Sunday and some do.  At my church lent starts on Ash Wednesday after Shrove Tuesday which is also known as Pancake Tuesday because making and eating pancakes or fatty sugary foods was considered a last feast with ingredients such as sugar, fat and eggs, whose consumption was traditionally restricted during the ritual fasting associated with Lent.
 
During the middle ages it was common for meat, eggs and dairy products to be forbidden during lent, now days it's somewhat more relaxed but you will find some parts of the world and some churches where they abstain from all animal products including fish, eggs, fowl and milk sourced from animals. 
In the Roman Catholic Church it is traditional to abstain from meat from mammals and fowl on Ash Wednesday and every Friday for the duration of Lent, although dairy products are still permitted.
 
Less and less people follow these fasting rules/practices these days but it is no unheard of for someone to 'give something up for lent'.  This is a personal decision and seen as a discipline for learning self control, and if you want to get heavy then you can say it's to identify with Christ's sufferings, and remember what the true pleasures are for followers of Christ.
 
This year on Shrove Tuesday a friend asked me what I planned to give up.  I had never done this in the past but thought "why not, I could do this" so what should I give up?  It would have to be something hard, something I used/ate/did every day, it would have to be a real sacrifice .
 
Chocolate - now that would be a real sacrifice... Did I mention I'm pregnant? I decided this was just too much to ask of me, and those I live with.  Also I had just arranged a desert night with a group of friends promising to make double chocolate crème brulee and there was no way I would make a desert that I couldn't eat and did I mention that I'm pregnant... You get the idea.  Maybe next year.
 
Face book - this was my older sisters idea and at first I thought it just wouldn't be enough.  But thinking about it more I realised I could easily spend several hours on face book every day, and I really enjoyed my face book applications especially farkle. 
 
So face book it was.  I still used Twitter which was set up to post my twitter updates to face book.  To change this I would have to go onto face book, and it was too late to change that as lent had already started. 
 
At first I did miss face book and resorted to trying to find farkle online anywhere else but no luck there. So I started playing some games on msn against one of my friends.  Didn't help that she wasn't online much when I was, our kids go to bed a very different times, hers much later than mine so by the time she'll get online I would be thinking of bed, had a few late nights there.
 
I do think I ended up spending less time online than I used to, I spend a lot more time doing things like home baking, sewing, made my own cleaning products.  I would love to say I spent more time with my son but I probably didn't.  I still used my computer but just didn't go on face book.
 
Now today being Easter I'm 'allowed' back on face book.  I think it was close to 8:30 when I first logged in so was no rush, and after catching up with al the comments on my twitter posts I tried to catch up with everyone else but there was far to much.  Played a few games of farkle and that's it... I've spent more time writing this post and reading other peoples blogs today than time on face book.
 
I wonder if I give up chocolate for lent next year if I'll be happy to go without when lent is over??