November 5th?

Remember, remember
The fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

That’s how the rhyme always went. We collected wood for the bonfire for weeks beforehand, we trundled our guys around the streets asking for “A penny for the Guy”. And then our mother said she wasn’t having her children begging on the streets like urchins. So that put a stop to that. The local rascals ran round putting bangers and rip-raps through people’s letterboxes on Mischief Night, November 4th. And our mother wouldn’t let us do that either. In fact she blocked up the letterbox to be on the safe side!

When we moved house my parents organised bonfire parties in the slightly larger garden. My mother made treacle toffee and parkin. Friends and relations came. Everyone brought fireworks. My father wrapped potatoes in foil and set them to bake in the embers.

Years later, Phil and I did the same in our own garden. My brother usually came and brought inappropriate fireworks, the kind you were supposed to watch from 50 yards away, and set them off at the bottom of the garden. It was several years before we realised that it was also his girlfriend/later fiancée/later wife’s birthday that we were also celebrating.

And now I find this, which suggests it’s all part of an older celebration or ceremony to ward off bad spirits, all part if a more pagan samhain:-

 “Weatherwatch: bonfires began as storm-season tributes to the god of thunder.
November was sacred to Thunor – or Thor – and ‘bone fires’ were lit in his name to ward off evil To the early Anglo-Saxons, November was “wint-monath”, or wind month, the start of the storm season. It was sacred to the weather god Thunor, the Anglo-Saxon name for Thor, whose hammering made the thunder – Thunor is Old English for thunder. His popularity was reflected in the widespread presence of hammer-shaped ornaments in Anglo-Saxon graves.

 Thunor was honoured in November with huge fires to drive away evil spirits. These bone-fires or bonfires also had a practical function: animals had been slaughtered to provide food for winter, and the fires turned the bones into fertiliser. German pagans sometimes put a straw effigy of Thor on top of their bonfires, and Anglo-Saxons may have done the same with Thunor. The November festivities merged with the earlier Celtic Samhain, and were later Christianised, before being absorbed into the 5 November celebration. Though as Thomas Hardy noted in his 1878 novel Return of the Native: “It is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot.”

Even now bonfires retain their primal appeal, giving us an enduring link to the old weather-god Thunor.”

Everything merges in the end.

Here’s a last word on Hallowe’en being sort of absorbed into the establishment church.  Mind you, I don’t remember our little church having problems with it. They used to,organise a hotpot supper, with the church hall decorated with pumpkin lanterns and daft games such as bobbing for apples in a bucket of water. Whoever managed to get hold of an apple with their teeth while trying not to get their face and hair soaking wet? I ask you!