arch_enemy wrote:
it was originally a pagan holy day many catholic holidays/celebrations were originally pagan easter is a good example of this
Actually, not likely. This trendy idea comes from a few late 19th century amateur archaeologists that were, well, amateurs and pretty bad at research. It caught on because it sounded sensational, but credible scholars, including atheist scholars and pagan scholars, have typically dismissed it outright. A friend of mine in college was rather disappointed after he looked into many of these claims himself (such as the ones made in the 'documentary' Zeitgeist), before he met me even, and found that they were simply all false (he was himself a very anti-Catholic pagan, of the asatru variety I believe, and later a published scholar of that faith for a time).
Easter is an intersting one since the only thing that possibly is derived from paganism there is the name, but it's only the name for the day in English and maybe a handful of other languages, and even then only the Latin Rite uses the term (the Easterns, and most other languages, use the more proper term Pascha, or Passion Sunday, or variations on that term).
Interestingly, a few of the pagan holidays commonly noted, such as the Gaelic Samhain for Halloween (though, again, that is not itself a Holy Day, it's merely the eve of a Holy Day, which has a strange history of becoming itself a celebration day, though not very big everywhere), is actually several centuries more recent than the celebration of the day in question (several centuries more recent then the celebration of All Saint's Day at any rate).
As for the day in question, Fat Tuesday, there really is no reason to believe it came about from anything other than trying to have a last hurrah and get rid of food before Lent, as often people do when they know they won't have something or are going to go into something strict for a long time, and back in the day (and still in the Eastern Rites and Eastern Orthodox) it was a pretty severe fast for 40 days (more really, and in the east they start a severe fast during the whole week BEFORE Lent starts). There are some sources that speculate that a lot of the general celebration practices as found in various European cultures derive from one, or several, of various Roman other other celebrations, but nothing seems particularly certain, and the root of the eating side, and what is eaten, seems entirely based on what was then forbidden during Lent. You'll probably find plenty of Catholic sources of less care that will tell you "meh, probably came out of some sort of pagan celebration or other" but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly definite on the matter.
Now, there probably was some sort of pagan holiday from SOME pagan group SOMEWHERE near the time of Fat Tuesday (though it's a floating day, it changes every year based on Lunar cycles), but that could be said of any day of the year, as there were lots of pagan holidays, as there were lots of pagan religions throughout the world, some of which were not even known well for a very long time. For instance, once could try and say it was taken from Chinese New Year, since Chinese New Year sometimes happens pretty close (this year it was the day before Fat Tuesday) and also is primarily celebrated through eating (for a week usually). But, then other times they are far apart, and this kind of practice seems to have started long before there was much contact between China and the West.
Of course, the other problem with attributing this to any particular pagan holiday is that often Fat Tuesday is in the Winter, and many groups didn't even have calendars that counted the winter months (it was just many days of gaps until spring came). Some did, some did not, but it typically wasn't a time to do anything (it's a time of scarcity for most after all).
I say this, though I'm actually someone who isn't particularly bothered by the idea of having Christianized pagan celebrations. We take the good that we find and purify it, and it helps move the culture into a new era, and it mimics converting the people themselves, so all is well and good with me. We should just get the history straight on which things happened how.
