I think it was often sweets just because kids only have so many vices so they wind up picking candy. Then we grow up associating Lent with giving up sweets.
Being non-Catholic, the only thing the Lenten season brought was some good jokes. A few years of Catholic school gave some perspective. And better jokes, from class mates.
I was taught it was something Catholics had to do because their rules were a little different.
yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes YES!!!
Especially the Good Friday service, which was neverending, a complete calisthenics routine with all the kneeling/standing over and over and over parts, and having to go up and kiss the feet of the life-size, very realistic and gruesome statue of crucified Jesus.
That came after a morning/afternoon of hell wherein Mom made us move, rearrange, scrub, and polish every square nanometer of the house while she cooked all the Easter food, including ham and kielbasa, on a fast and abstinence (strictly enforced) day. One year I snuck a pack of hot dogs out of the fridge and hid in my room and ate the whole thing, and I didn’t feel a bit bad about it either. 
As for giving up stuff, I usually managed about 3 days, tops, and it was usually somthing like candy or soda. We were told that Jesus suffered for 40 days so we had to give up something we liked so we suffered along with him.
As we got older, junior high and up, our religious ed teachers encouraged us to do stuff like looking at our major sins and trying to find ways to overcome them, and to add more prayer and reflection to our lives. Naturally young teenagers didn’t really care for that idea either, but during Lent as an adult I try to do that now.
Rather than giving something up for Lent, over recent years I have heard of folks doing something positive instead.
For example, issuing at least one sincere compliment a day, or picking up at least one piece of litter per day.
Better idea, seems to me.
mmm
Our nickels and pennies went to “save the pagan babies”. One doesn’t hear that term so much these days.
I know we had “rice bowls” but I don’t remember if they were associated with Lent.
I just did a search, and yep. Lent!
It was for me usually some form of candy. I didn’t have much of an allowance so it was fairly straightforward. Theses last fifteen years or so I’ve been giving up sex for Lent. Oh, the sacrifice!
And in spite of all that time we spent saving money for the pagan babies, we never did get delivery of our baby. Delivery…heh.
I gave up hope for Lent.
Something better than “I gave up Lent for Lent! Wakka-wakka-wakka!”, I hope.
I grew up Lutheran. There were seasonal liturgical observances, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and so on. But it wasn’t a practice, at least in our church, to “give up” something for Lent.
I’m Episcopal now. Lenten observances are common, either giving up something, or doing something extra. But it’s not required, it’s more of a personal spiritual exercise. I give up meat. I’m a real carnivore, and when I have to remind myself not to have that burger, I also am reminding myself of the great sacrifice Christ made for all.
Our Catholic family always gave up something significant to us personally for lent. It could be food or an activity (i.e. playing basketball), but it had to be a sacrifice we would feel.
I don’t recall being allowed any cheat days, but I do recall being allowed to eat a food I had given up if I was dining at a non- Catholic’s home. The thinking behind that dispensation was that it would unnecessarily embarrass your hostess if you refused to eat something your hostess had prepared.
Reflecting on this as an adult, I wonder if it was based on not ‘outing oneself’ as a Catholic at a time when Catholic’s were considered second class cituzens by some.
I was raised Congregational. We practiced Lent. I don’t recall what I normally picked to give up. It was probably candy, but may have occasionally been things like a certain game I liked or something else.
I was raised Catholic. When I was little, I took it very seriously (as seriously as a eight-year-old without the gift of perspective can take the threat of eternal damnation), and I would give up multiple things, like candy AND soda AND cartoons AND … you get the idea. I’m sure my level of piety was annoying to everyone around me.
As I got older and more disillusioned with the whole “existence of god” thing, I started doing less and less. My parents started getting miffed that I was giving up things that weren’t really a “do without”, like giving up playing Nintendo at my friend’s house (since we didn’t have one I could only play there), when I really was only over at my friend’s house once a week anyway, and we had graduated to computer games instead of console games. I remember a few times they would send me back to the drawing board. I want to claim I did something devious, like claim I was going to give up all meat for Lent, thereby forcing them into adjusting their cooking to a vegetarian routine, but I’m pretty sure I ended up finding some other thing to give up, like soda, which I rarely had anyway but got them off my back.
Later I found some literature that said Lent was either giving something up or doing something extra (I think the context was something like “start jogging” or “read a book” or other self-improvement habits). This was a gold-mine, as I started claiming I was going to “do a task” for Lent that was something I was already going to do anyway, like study for upcoming tests or practice for the track team or whatever.
Later, as I had stopped believing altogether but hadn’t gotten my parents to accept that, I started picking “do an activity” items that they couldn’t verify, like holding the door for my classmates at school, and just not changing my habits at all. Eventually, after I was confirmed and therefore an adult in the church, I just confessed that I was really an atheist, which got a lot of opprobrium and a sit-down with the local priest. He was actually really cool about it and understood that forcing someone to go through the motions doesn’t make a believer. (I think it helped that my arguments were somewhat better reasoned than “but I don’t wanna tithe” and were more along the lines of “the problem of evil”.)
Much like new year’s resolutions, I can see the point (getting you to give up a vice or begin a virtue), but honestly if it needs to be done you shouldn’t wait for a specific time period to make it happen.
Not being religious (and my wider family being firmly in the Anglican camp when it comes to religious matters), it was never a thing at all. I’d never even heard of the idea of not eating meat on Fridays until I moved to Australia and saw an ad in the supermarket promoting fish on Friday.
I grew up with a vague understanding that we were Christians instilled in me, but we weren’t religious in any way, so Lent was nonexistent. And both of my parents grew up attending Baptist churches anyways, so we probably wouldn’t have ended up doing Lent even if we’d started going to church.
Parochial school survivor here.
As you can imagine, Lent was a huge deal when I was a kid. Candy was the most common “give up”, although sometimes “desserts” or “snacks” popped up every so often. The point was that sacrificing something you like is a form of self-denial, although it was never phrased that way. Mine was always chocolate. Being a lifelong chocoholic, it was a pretty big deal for me.
If you wanted the nuns to make a big deal about you, you nixed food and gave up your weekly allowance as a donation to one of your parish’s charities. My parish, for example, regularly made donations to an overseas relief organization as well as a domestic one. There was a special donation box in the principal’s office. I did that one year and I instantly became the nuns’ pet.
I still live in a heavily Catholic area, so although I’m lapsed, I’m always aware of what time of year it is.
OK, the way Easter has fallen this year, this week there was Ash Wednesday. But there was also the Novena de la Gracia to St Francis Xavier (March 4th to 12th), and the pilgrimages to Xavier which coincide as much as possible with the Novena. While we didn’t do the pilgrimages (my brother Ed does, with his eldest), we did pray the Novena every day after dinner. I was born March 13th: if I’d been a boy I would have had the choice of going by Francisco, Fran, Javi, Javier… We always ate fish for lunch two or three days per week (Spain in general eats a lot more fish than other countries); during Lent one of them just happened to be Friday and you had to remember not to have meat with your breakfast or your midafternoon sandwich.
There was a year that I was having anemia so the doctor said I could be exempt from abstinence; lunch still was fish, but I was allowed to have meat in the other meals; he suggested giving up something else or making an attempt at being specially good in some respect, and Mom had to shut up (she’d been getting ready to get all indignant, but c’mon, he was a graduate of Xavier’s like Dad…). In theory the rules don’t apply to little children; if one of us who was too young to have started preparation for Communion “skipped”, they wouldn’t get berated, but it simply was easier to remember “no meat for anybody” than “you can, you cannot, you cannot either, you can…”
Very often, though, a liturgical season carries multiple meanings and is associated with different periods in the life of Jesus or the life of the Church. And it’s not all nice and linear.
My understanding has always been that while the fasting and the 40 days were from Jesus’ time in the wilderness, Lent was a period of spiritual preparation for the observance of Jesus’ death and resurrection - that it is in anticipation of those events. So it’s a sort of overlay between the periods of Jesus’ preparation for the beginning of his ministry, and Jesus’ preparing for its conclusion.
That’s my understanding as well (and I’m a former altar boy, so I’m authorized to weigh in on theological disputes). Lent is a time of contemplation and penance, preparing one’s self spiritually for the symbolic rebirth that comes with Easter. The fact that it’s 40 days aligns nicely with Jesus’ time in the desert (but then, everything in the bible comes in 40’s: flood, Israelites wandering…)