I grew up Catholic, and I’m not sure how old I was when I realized everyone wasn’t Catholic. It seemed everyone in my life not only celebrated Christmas and Easter but had a first Communion and knew what Lent was.
Turns out lots of people know about Mardi Gras/Carnivale/ paczki day, but don’t necessarily know that the celebration of Fat Tuesday is sort of about indulging enough to make it through the 40 days of Lent, a season of atonement that begins the next day on Ash Wednesday and runs through Easter.
Our friends at Wikipedia explain Lent like this:

Lent, in Christian 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.^[1].
This practice was virtually universal in Christendom until the Protestant Reformation^[2]

Most people I knew growing up gave up something for Lent — chocolate was a common one for kids, but since my birthday always fell during Lent, I was careful not to make any choices that would put birthday cake out of bounds. This sacrifice was supposed to keep you mindful of being a better person to deserve the sacrifice Christ made for you.
Easter is next Sunday so this seems to be a good time to share a Lenten season newsletter from Buddy Stallings, the vicar at St. Bartholomew’s, an Episcopal church here in New York that not only has beautiful church services but also thought-provoking email newsletters. Regardless of your faith, or lack thereof, I think Buddy’s column from just before the start of Lent seems a good fit for a conversation about self awareness and improving one’s life.
Not to ruin it for you, but I love this line: There is a very thin line between an honest appraisal of our lives and the darkness of recrimination. I am convinced that a great deal of good comes from the former and am fairly certain that establishing blame is about all that comes from the latter.

February 24, 2009
I am all for self-examination, having spent years engaged in it in one form or another. In some sense that tendency is an occupational hazard; in another it is just the way I am wired. But I do worry about it as a process when it gets institutionalized as it does during the season of Lent. Tomorrow we will mark our faces with ashes as a reminder of our mortality and our sinfulness. Though both are true, we are indeed mortal and beyond a doubt fall far short of the ideal, a little of that goes a long way. 

So tomorrow when we say to you, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” remember also that it is good dust and that it and we belong to God now and always.

There is a very thin line between an honest appraisal of our lives and the darkness of recrimination. I am convinced that a great deal of good comes from the former and am fairly certain that establishing blame is about all that comes from the latter. Legally knowing whom to blame is important. Even in spiritual examination it helps to know something about the origin of our sinfulness, but too often at the core we believe that we are bad, that we are fundamentally flawed. Surprisingly, it is even true that just below the surface of the most arrogant, self-centered jerk we know, there is a deep hole of emptiness and self-doubt. (Knowing that does not make me like him/her any better; it just helps me understand more about myself when I am a jerk.)  

I know that the “law and order” folks are thinking, “some people need to feel bad about themselves because they are bad!” The problem there is that feeling bad about ourselves is not necessarily the way to an amended life. If somehow, perhaps through the practice of good religion, we could come to see and believe that God has created us to live as people of goodness and generosity – we just might find ourselves transformed, probably not every moment in every way but at least occasionally. That is not being self-centered; that is knowing – deeply knowing – that at our core God has made us good, endowed us in fact with a spark of God’s self. Playing to that end in thanksgiving is a much more effective way to live righteously than wallowing in how awful we are.

Volumes have been written about why we are as we are. Who knows? Our tradition when it is unexamined plays a role in our basic distrust of our goodness. “I am a worm and no man,” says the old language of Psalm 22; “O wretched man that I am; I do that which I would not do and do not do that which I would do,” laments Paul in his letter to the Romans. I am not a worm though I can be wormy; I am not wretched though I can act in wretched ways. Maybe that is what the psalmist and Paul meant, but such an interpretation has not often been the message of the church.