This month, in my peregrinations across the land, from one confectionery to another, I came across a sight as awful as it was enticing. November bones, those ‘bones of the dead’ – the almond-filled, icing-topped, bone-shaped sweets – appeared in the displays a month early. By the beginning of October, they could be seen in cafes of national renown as well as in village bakeries, to say nothing of supermarkets.
It’s not the first time I’ve encountered out-of-season bones. Traditionally, they’re associated with the feasts of All Souls and All Saints. But a few years ago one renowned confectioner actually forgot to produce them on time, and there have been years when others began to display them a week or two early. This is the first time, however, that I’ve noticed the appearance of the bones a full month early, across the board.
At one confectionary, I asked the young woman at the counter whether the bones would continue to be produced through November. Of course not, she replied, the bones are for October.
Yes, October. Her first instinct was to associate the bones with Halloween. The change in timing of the bones is going hand in hand with a change in their meaning. They’re no longer connected to a liturgical calendar but to a secular one.
If you’d like material evidence of secularisation, look no further. Forget what people believe, or think they believe, in the abstract. Look instead at the rhythm of their lives.
The November bones used to be a minor climax in the social life of a religion that preaches that being adult is, firstly, about knowing how to die. The sweets marked the month of the dead. Each mouthful of pleasure was a memento mori.
Traditionally, the sweets appeared the day after a vigil, which included a day of fasting. It would have been held today, October 31. Throughout the traditional liturgical calendar, sweets punctuate periods of fasting and abstinence.
The fasts themselves were associated with alms-giving. They were meant to be a doubly creative act: spiritual preparation and a token of a more humane society.
For children, the bone appearing under their pillow (left by a heavenly guardian angel) was a mark of judgement: it was children who had been ‘good’ who received it. Really naughty children would instead receive charred (real) bones and burnt matches from the devil himself.
In Malta, you can’t go wrong with the November bones. They’re a benchmark of whether your inner calendar – your time of life – is liturgical or secular
I doubt how many children ever received a visit from the devil; but one of my dare-devil uncles did, once, back in the 1940s, and 30 years later that exemplary punishment was still making the rounds among a dozen nephews and nieces. A memento mori for adults, the bone was an ethical audit for the children.
Now, it seems the November bones are going the way of Christmas, commercialised a month or more before the real season. In time, they may go the way of the honey-ring, previously a Christmas sweet, now available all year round – not to mention the Lenten sweet, the kwarezimal, which some cafés sell all year round, and even the figolla (which is sold all year round at the airport souvenir shop).
There are hold-outs. The Judas money bag (il-borża ta’ Ġuda), a sweet qassata, is generally only available in the latter part of Lent. A prominent cafe serves its delicious anchovy qassatat only during Lent, while one Żejtun pastizzerija will only serve them hot on the days of Our Lady of Sorrows and Good Friday (though it does sell them frozen during the rest of the year).
But hold-outs are easily bypassed. What’s important is the entire symbolic system which makes sense of any single item. With the November bones, first the link with fasting went away; then the link with the significance of November.
The sweet remained but it no longer means the same thing. There is bigger preparation and anticipation for Halloween – costumes, parties, fun – and so it’s logical that the sweet is linked to what is of major focus.
Let no one get the idea that I’m blaming the confectioners or pointing to the corrosive influence of ‘pagan’ feasts like Halloween. Christianity’s stock-in-trade, historically, was taking pagan feastsand reinterpreting them creatively. (Indeed, the feast of St Martin on November 11 was, in some countries, celebrated in Halloween style.) But that’s not happening here.
The erosion of meaning of the November bones needs to be traced to changes in the rules of fasting, to begin with, not to mention to a clerical attitude towards festive sweets that treats them as childish, rather than powerful condensed symbols and aide-memoires (much like the coloured ribbons we wear these days to focus our minds on solidarity or cures for fatal illnesses).
My only point is a theory, a big theory about November bones – the big bone theory, if you like.
It’s always been a problem to measure secularisation. Sexual transgressions? The Old Testament is full of them – but it’s also full of Yahweh. Sunday Mass attendance? Across Europe, the regular attendees are a mere fraction of those who nonetheless describe themselves as Christian.
But, at least in Malta, you can’t go wrong with the November bones. They’re a benchmark of whether your inner calendar – your time of life – is liturgical or secular; whether you see yourself surrounded by the Church’s cloud of witnesses; whether you think of fasting as having to do with slimming down or building yourself and society up.
So score yourself from 1-10. Score more highly, the more you think it matters that the November bones are produced ‘in season’. The lower the score, the more secularised you are, no matter what you think.
If you score between 1-3, you’re probably a millennial. If you score 8-10, we should meet in a coffee shop some time next month. And if you’re ambivalent, scoring 4-6, I’ll bet you’re an overworked parish priest.