Wishbone

If you break it, it's yours

BONE BREAK

Since I like process more than products, I’m the kind of slow housemaker who not only roasts the poultry but then boils the remains to create stock, making a whole event of picking out the tiny meat bits to conjure a soup.

For each carcass there’s the one precious Y-bone I save in a Mason jar labelled “Wishes.” Mostly of the chicken variety, with the occasional larger turkey.

That is, when we ate meat. Many years and divorce later, in a predominately pescatarian demi-custody household, the wishes jar has long been fully stocked yet stagnant. What does one do with all these accumulated, unassigned, unbroken but unformed dreams? It takes two to break them so they’ve been waiting for their moment to activate, while aging and stinking. My kids are grossed out by my collection and demand the end of this experiment.

So I took to the internet to research wishbone art projects and the origin of the concept of wishbones in the first place. I scrubbed, bleached and shellacked my battle remains and sought inspiration for what to do with them next.

Who knew there’s so much culture in this simple, elegant structure known as the furcula, or that it even has a purpose. According to Backyard Poultry, this coveted

furcula hangs off the bird’s skeleton like a necktie and helps stabilize them for flight, a thing that modern turkeys don’t do much of anymore. All poultry have them—chickens, ducks, broad-breasted vs. heritage turkeys, and even geese—and people have been using these domesticated birds to grant wishes or tell the future since ancient times.

The real story as usual isn’t why these bones are so unique but why are humans so weird? How do we come up with such stuff? This poultry post dates this tradition back to the Etruscans,

an ancient civilization that lived in the area we know as Italy today. But instead of breaking the bone in half, Etruscans would make a wish while stroking the bone—more like a good luck charm. According to Peter Tate’s book, Flights of Fancy, it was during the St. Martin’s Night celebrations in medieval Europe that people started the wishbone tradition as we know it today with two people pulling on the wishbone, then called “merry thought.”

Poultry have a long history of being used to grant wishes and tell the future. Ancient Greeks used to place grain on marked cards or mark kernels of corn with letters and carefully record which ones their chickens pecked first. The Roman army carried cages of “sacred chickens” with them—the designated chicken keeper was known as the pullarius. Once, as Andrew Lawler writes in Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, the sacred chickens suggested a Roman general stay in camp. He fought instead. “He and most of his army were slain within three hours as a devastating earthquake shook Italy,” Lawler writes. Obey the chickens—or else. The poultry premonitions were so important that many advisers began to game the system. Chickens were often kept hungry or overfed the day before “divining” desired answers.

My emphasis there on the Obey part. Because, on a day such as Thanksgiving, that’s certainly something to ponder. There’s more cultural overlap between these winged creatures and people than you might have imagined or want to know about, as the article continues:

• During Yom Kippur, some Jews practice kapparot where a live chicken is swung overhead in a circle three times, taking on that person’s sins, before the bird is slaughtered and given to the poor.

• In Santeria and Voodoo, chickens are a common sacrifice and one can occasionally still find the tradition of reading the future in the animal’s entrails — a custom which also dates back to Roman times.

• Geese helped foretell how bad the coming winter would be in European and Scandinavian traditions. Tate writes that after St. Martin’s Night, a dried goose’s breastbone would be examined to determine “whether the coming winter would be cold, wet, or dry.”

Ultimately it’s a poultry farming website, so of course they encourage more poultry production and consumption (if ethically and old-school), and more breaking of bones as a nice tradition, preferably a few days after your feast to leave the bone to dry and more satisfyingly snap. So take that as you wish. And best wishes for your wish-making.

BONE MAKE

One artist objects to the industrialization and resulting uniformity of this poultry practice through this powerful visual below of many thousands of replicating bones, each exactly the same as the next in numbing repetition.

Monoculture - the thousands of bones on display by Kate MccGwire, image courtesy of TrendHunter

A wall spiral of 23,000 little forked bones called “Brood” by Kate MccGwire, as reviewed in 2012:

If wishbones really do grant good fortune, then the art installation titled Brood by Kate MccGwire is filled with enough fortune to last a lifetime. It is made up of 23,000 chicken wishbones. Mounted on a wall in a stunning spiral pattern, this artwork was not made just for its visual appeal.

Brood by Kate MccGwire pays tribute to the dead — in particular, dead chickens. According to an accompanying statement, “MccGwire selected only the remains of battery-farmed chickens, the unnatural GM uniformity of the bones is shocking: transferring the ancient practices of witchcraft to a much more contemporary and scary one.” Individually, the wishbone symbolizes hope. Together, however, the mass represents “a cull, a killing field, the horrors of genocide and slaughter of innocents,” as written on her website.

Another poultry artist, Helen Bodycomb, works smaller, making more delicate clusters that offer not judgment so much as honor and props to the “humble wishbone” and its nostalgic game of luck and rivalry. I’d note that “Bodycomb” seems a great last name for such hard forked part installation endeavors. Her take on her work is more playful:

The game involves two opponents who each form a secret wish, and then tug apart the wishbone using hooked little fingers. Only the person holding the sternum centre after the wishbone is splintered into two (the victor), will have their secret wish come true. The secret wish of the vanquished player will remain unfulfilled. This game of luck seldom considers the life of the hen whose life and death have enabled both the meal and the game. In recognition, I have made several major works featuring the humble chicken wishbone.

She makes her assortments into snowflake or flower-like mementos or this one called “Pandora’s Box” which to me resembles the springs inside an old mattress.

From Helen Bodycomb

Perhaps I would have fit right into the morose and mad Victorian times when hairballs were incorporated into needlepoints and you could decorate your dollhouse with paltry poultry furniture! Follow the link for some curious folk art collecting of miniscule bone chairs, among other upcycled concoctions like mutton bone dolls, a pinecone toy owl, and other odd era arts which transformed the overlooked into the extraordinary.

Everyday objects like wishbones, spools and nut shells were all given a new life as fanciful, yet functional art objects. All the rage in the 19th century, this crafty trend of turning trash into tiny treasures resulted in Victorian fancies.

Wishbone furniture from The National Museum of Toys & Miniatures

And this weird whimsy continues into the 1940s with the humorous bone buddies of Robert Whiting as fashioned in his elfin workshop in England.

Cat Whiskers vintage shop in Bridlington, England with their display of Robert Whiting’s jovial guys and his whimsical workshop.

Will you be breaking bread together this Thanksgiving across precarious divides, and try to break bones later?

Any odd traditions in your home you’d like to share here? For what do you wish?

Posting early this week to take time away from tech, and doing my best to detox off the internet and all things commercial. And for that I am grateful. I wish the same for you and yours.

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