Unnoticed by most, perhaps even by devout churchgoers, today is Candlemas.

On one elementary level it means it’s already been 40 days since Christmas.

Meteorologically, it means, yesterday’s torrential rain notwithstanding, that the worst of winter is over and we can already feel the first hot breezes of spring.

There is the first scene in Fellini’s Amarcord which shows the devastating impact on a small rural community of the first hot southerly breezes awakening long-repressed feelings and instincts.

The Church celebrates the Purification of our Lord, although the accent has always been on the Blessed Virgin coming out of the mandatory 40 days after birth.

There are other links on the popular level with other rites and traditions and these somehow seem to be crystalised in the symbolism of candles. For many centuries, the Maltese have kept and revered the Candlemas candle and seen it as a sign of blessing and of heavenly protection in times of danger.

But the Candlemas candle has other links which go all the way from feudal times to all our yesterdays. There was a long-standing tradition, dating back to feudal times, of subjects expressing in a public and solemn way, their fealty and loyalty to the feudal lord.

In the times of the Knights, this fealty and loyalty was expressed in a ceremony at which the parish priests, representing the various villages, presented a Candlemas candle to the Grand Master.

This ceremony was retained under the British. Many still remember how the last Governor General, Sir Maurice Dorman, courageously came forward to stand ‘four-square’ with the Maltese at a time when the British wanted to run down the Dockyard.

Fittingly, after all those centuries, it was removed when Malta was about to become a republic although inflamed partisan spirits at the time saw it as anything but progressive.

The Church itself has completely changed the significance of the day – it changed it to a Feast of the Lord rather than of the Virgin, and in Malta it has turned the parallel ceremony where parish priests present a candle to the archbishop into a ceremony of gifts being offered to the Church homes.

But deep down, the significance of the day from the meteorological point of view remains the same. Candlemas foreshadows Carnival and the rude re-awakening of animal spirits after the lethargy and cold of winter

And to the Maltese of 2011, as to all those who share the same customs and traditions as we do, its significance could be in inverse order to what it used to be for centuries past. All through those years, Candlemas signified the persistence of a form of feudal tradition. Today, its absence signifies along with so many other signs, that Malta has come through those feudal times once and for ever. Its absence is a sign of our political maturity as a nation, no longer a colony, an independent and sovereign state, treated as equal in the concourse of nations come together in what is called the European Union.

Strange as it may seem, it is Candlemas without candles. And a right thing too.