The Festival of the Dead in Sicily has distant origins and is linked to the Christian tradition. The exaltation of life and carefreeness is learned from an early age.

Naque eats Celtic New Year and was transformed into a religious festival. The Feast of the Dead in Sicily it is an opportunity to commemorate loved ones, but above all to teach children not to be afraid of death. However, its rites are undermined by consumerism and the ascendancy of Halloween.

The importance of Feast of the Dead and why it is changing its characteristics

Sciascia said that:

"Christianity allowed those properly pagan explosions, in the most current sense that the word paganism has; those rites, those festivals, that projection and personification of material and carnal instances of the myths; that choice and designation of the mythical, but at the same time protectors".

The definition seems to fit perfectly for a party like that of “All Saints”, considered one with the “Festival of the Dead”; day apparently dedicated to mourning and pain, but which in Sicily is seen as a joyful celebration, dedicated especially to children and closely linked to the symbolic value of food.

The Feast of the Dead and its recreational - instructive function of the feast and its rites:

“November 1st is the day on which Sicilian society decides that it is necessary to give children an education aimed at respect for one's dead. Education also aimed at the exaltation offamily identity (even if it is not "the deceased grandfather" who brings the gifts, but "the dead" in a generic sense). Where we come from can be said in many ways. We could say that it is a celebration with very ancient origins which is based on the concept of giving."

The origins date back to the year 835 AD, when Pope Gregory II, seeing that the Catholic Church was unable to eradicate the ancient pagan cults linked to the Celtic tradition (whose calendar indicated October 31st as the last day of the year), moved the feast of “All Saints” from May 13th to November 1st with the hope of thus being able to give a new meaning to profane rites.

According to the Druidic year, November 1 was the Samhain, literally “all souls” end of the pastoral year and first day of winter, in which the night was longer than the day. This peculiarity allowed the prince of darkness to call all the spirits to him and be able to pass from one world to another. The Pope's attempt to eradicate this myth failed. The church then added, in the 10th century, the “Feast of the Dead” on November 2, in memory of the souls of the disappeared.

The celebrations of the Feast of the Dead took place through the offering of food, masquerades and bonfires, the profane customs thus justified.

In the passage, legend has it that the dead stole from rich pastry chefs, greengrocers and traders, to leave gifts for their loved ones while they were alive. This is where the tradition of "treasure hunt" or "pick up the shoes" for children was born.

The educational value lies precisely in breaking the threshold of fear with the world of the dead. The threshold of mystery decreases between the living and the dead. Children are told that the dead love them, they must not be afraid of those who bring them as a gift the most beautiful things they could desire: toys and sweets.

In addition to toys of all sorts, there is the custom of giving new shoes, sometimes filled with sweets, such as the particular biscuits typical of this holiday: the crosses 'i motto (dead man's bones) or i pupatelli stuffed with toasted almonds, i taralli donuts coated with sugary icing, i nucatoli and i White and brown tetus, the former veiled in sugar, the latter in cocoa powder.

Dried fruit and chocolates accompany 'The Canister', a basket full of seasonal first fruits, dried fruit and other sweets such as marten fruit no Sugar dolls painted sugar figurines, portraying traditional figures such as the Paladins.
An exclusively Palermo tradition, they are called "pupi a cena" or "pupaccena", due to a legend that tells of an Arab nobleman who fell into poverty, who offered them to his guests to make up for the lack of delicious food.
In some parts of Sicily it is prepared muffoletta, hot freshly baked loaf "cunzata", in the morning on the day of commemoration of the deceased, with oil, salt, pepper and oregano, anchovy fillets in oil and a few slices of primosale cheese.

The "treasure hunt" of the 2nd morning was in fact called "seek the dead/find the dead": typical was the phrase in the discovery of "li cosi di morti"/the gifts "Ccà su"/qua sono. That of "arranging the shoes" instead consisted of placing the old shoes in a corner of the house, or in more ancient times even scattering them around the town, to find them in the morning filled with sweets or replaced by sugar shoes or even new ones.

Everything is based on that concept of the gift which in everyday life is expressed with the phrase "it's just a thought".

Parents express their love by saying that the gift is brought by the dead, but in this way they also convey the important message of tradition and belonging, teaching them to live a peaceful relationship with death.

A lesson which, in Sicilian culture, also occurs through the exorcising of a place such as the cemetery. Together with the children they go to visit their loved ones in the cemetery, in ancient times they even ate on the tomb or in the family chapel, a tradition later prohibited by a papal edict, but still alive in certain towns in Calabria."

Today the Feast of the Dead for children it is a second carnival rather than an epiphany. Consumerism and globalization have taken over the transmission of memories.

Lately we have been witnessing the predominance of Halloween party on old local customs, because traditions are not eternal. If in forty years there is a society that forgets "the dead" to take on Halloween, it will mean that that holiday was no longer functional or usable. It is not a "sin", it is simply no longer indispensable and so it is replaced and changed.

Sciascia was right, then, when he answered the question “What is a religious festival in Sicily?” writing:

"It would be easy to answer that it is anything but a religious holiday. It is first and foremost one existential explosion; the explosion of the collective id, in a country where the community exists only at the level of the id.
Since it is only during the celebration that the Sicilian emerges from his condition of a single man, which is the condition of his watchful and painful superego, to find himself part of a class, of a class, of a city."

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