Kristina Chetcuti has tea with two Valletta ladies who every year cut enough tiny confetti paper to cover a whole basketball pitch, in preparation of their celebration of the feast of St Paul.

The Galea sisters open one of the 80 bags full of tightly packed confetti and tip its contents onto their six metre-squared dining table. Suddenly there’s a tablecloth of confetti – even my teacup is hidden under the mounds of paper.

I quickly do the math: if we had to slash open all the bags and spread the confetti all around, we could easily cover the whole surface area of St George’s Square in Valletta.

Eddie Galea, their father, a devotee of St Paul, packing away confetti in boxes in the 1970s.

These confetti are a year’s worth of work for sisters Marquita Galea, 62, and Anna Galea, 64. We are in the living room of their third floor apartment in St Paul Street, Valletta, discussing the confetti-cutting tradition which has been passed on from one generation of Galeas to the next.

They do it out of sheer devotion for the patron saint of Malta, St Paul, whose feast is going to be celebrated on Saturday. “Inħobbuħ wisq (we love him too much),” say the sisters.

The ritual was started, more or less, a century ago by their grandfather Antonio, who lived in the very same Valletta apartment where we are counting confetti bags. A devotee of St Paul, Antonio decided that throwing confetti on the marching brass band every February 10 would add to the merriment of the feast.

Nannu Antonio was meticulous about the paper-cutting and would let none of his grandchildren help out. “He was very particular that the confetti were all the same size,” says Ms Galea. He would get boxes of paper sheets from the Bonnici Press a few doors down, as well as used lotto sheets, cut them first in strips, and then in tiny squares.

Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

The amazing effect of this painstaking task could then be seen on the feast day: when Nannu Antonio’s confetti were thrown from the balcony, they didn’t just fall down; they fluttered, in slow motion, like snowflakes.

When their grandfather passed away, his son Eddie and his children moved into the St Paul Street apartment. “We used to live in Old Theatre Street, not very far really, but my father never gave it a second thought because from St Paul Street, we could all enjoy the feast day so much more.”

They only take a break in summer because ‘you switch on the fan and everything blows away’

Mr Galea, a major in the police force, took over the paper cutting and this time Marquita, Anna and their brother Paul were encouraged to help out. The volume of confetti increased and they even added balloons: 400 of them, hanging in a net across the street, released when the band marches past their door, to the delight of the tipsy revellers merrymaking alongside the brass band.

Every February 10, their house would be opened up to about 100 people, all coming to watch the ‘marċ tal-briju’ and the procession from the vantage point of the Galea balconies. One of the balconies was reserved for the huge extended family and the other one for her father’s visiting friends which included – as photos around the house attest – prime ministers George Borg Olivier and Eddie Fenech Adami.

The children had front row privilege. “My father used to position us by height: the tiniest of us cousins and children on the front, but we’d still all be squashed,” says Ms Galea.

The bags of confetti stacked away in the living room. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

For a while in the 1980s, the feast day of St Paul was scratched off from the public holiday calendar. But the parishioners kept on celebrating it just the same, if not more actively, to make a political statement.

Several would take the day off. Marquita’s daughter, for example, missed school every February 10. “My father would write a note to the nuns saying: ‘Natasha is not attending school today because it is the feast of St Paul’ and the nuns would always willingly close an eye.”

As the siblings’ mother had passed away when they were little children, their father was their role model. So when he died in 1987, they followed in his footsteps, and true to form, every year, on February 11, they start the paper cutting in preparation for the next year.

Stacks of paper make their way to them, not just from the Bonnici press but even from friends, neighbours and colleagues.

“At work people are all the time coming up with some magazine or other and asking me ‘Anna, din tajba għal San Pawl?’ (Anna, is this good for St Paul?) People’s junk mail ends up recycled as confetti.

A rain of confetti. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

“It’s like a hobby for us,” they say. They snip away every evening – still keeping to Nannu Antonio’s size for the snowflake effect – while watching television, packing the confetti away in supermarket plastic bags and then stacking them in the corner of the living room. They only take a break in summer because “you switch on the fan and everything blows away”.

These days their balconies are not as crowded as they used to be when their father was still around, but they’ll still be about 20 to 30 milling around; and they fervently hope that the younger generation of Galeas will keep the confetti tradition alive in future.

On the day, at about 3pm, the Galea siblings will be first in line on the balcony.

“Oh, we have to throw confetti too! We’ve been doing it for 60 years and we’d never miss for the world. We become like children again.”

Further down the road, other households will be throwing confetti as well. But the Galeas’ are more “inkrepattivi” (annoying) because they are so tiny.

“They get stuck in the hair, the clothes – you take them home with you,” they both chuckle.

After they’ve thrown their confetti, they put on their Sunday best for the evening procession and go with the other parishioners and Beltin to St Paul’s church to witness the re-entry of the statue.

They sing the Sancti Pauli, with tears welling up in their eyes.

For the past fortnight, the sisters have been praying every morning “biex jiftaħ l-ajru” (for good weather) on the day of the feast, which this year will come early because February 10 falls on Ash Wednesday – the beginning of Lent – and no feast can be held then.

In case of a storm or heavy downpour, the feast is cancelled.

“We’re always terribly disappointed when that happens but, after all, St Paul got to Malta because of stormy weather.”