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It allowed me to sing hallelujah in the Lenten season,” referring to the run-up to Easter.

The length of time may be symbolic, but the call to action is not; a Lenten boycott of the retailer, says Bryant’s website, is “a spiritual act of resistance.”

He traces his awareness of their potential to a moment, at the age of about 8, when his psychiatrist father took him to the Lenten carnival held every year at the mental hospital near where they lived in Valencia, Venezuela.

That didn’t include the readers who reached out to me after I wrote a column about Mami’s capirotada — Mexican Lenten bread pudding.

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA, said St Patrick's Day has always been marked not only because it was a celebration of the patron saint but also because a dispensation allowed the Lenten fast to be broken - meat to be eaten and alcohol drunk - whilst Christians everywhere else were fasting.