Día de los Muertos

One of the most meaningful yearly celebrations in Mexico, in fact throughout Latin America, is Día de los Muertos ("Day of the Dead"), celebrated for nearly a week at the end of October and the beginning of November. This elaborate celebration, dedicated to the cult of the dead (also referred to as Todos Santos—"All Saints' Day"), combines pre-Hispanic rituals and beliefs with Catholic practices and symbols. The central idea is that during this period of public and private rituals, the living and dead family members and friends are joined together in an atmosphere of communion and spiritual regeneration.

Important elements of Day of the Dead festivities in Central Mexico were practiced by Aztecs and have become integrated into the Catholic traditions of Mexico and other parts of Latin America. This same pattern of images of the dead, altar, food offerings, incense, and communion is carried out today. It is important to note that the rituals, symbols, and elaborate decorations of home altars and cemeteries differ somewhat according to region. However, all Day of the Dead celebrations focus on a spiritual covenant between the human community and supernatural entities of deceased family members, friends, or saints. What is outstanding in all cases is the belief that what happens during one's life here on this earth is dependent, in part, on treating the dead well. People believe that if the dead are not venerated, nurtured, and remembered in the proper manner, their own economic security, family stability, and health will be in jeopardy. Therefore, careful and generous preparations are carried out.

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Prominent in the decorations of family and cemetery altars are marigold flowers, or zempoalxochitl (a Nahuatl word meaning "twenty-flower"). This sense of preparation for the Day of the Dead intensifies at the start of October, when the people set out the necessary cash and other goods to be used in the generous decorations of altars and tombs, and at the ceremonial meals for the dead and the living. Journeys are made to local and regional markets, sometimes covering several hundred miles, so that the correct foods and decorations can be purchased in time for the sacred week.

Most important are preparations of special foods for the dead. These include baked breads, candied fruit, skulls made of sugar, and human figurines made of pumpkin seeds, as well as apple, pear, and quince preserves. Papier-mâché images of various kinds are purchased or made to be used in the decorations of the altars and the graves. The last and most crucial items to be picked or purchased are the zempoalxochitl flowers. Since these flowers will last only four days, they are placed on altars and tombs and as pathways between the cemeteries and the homes on the day before the Day of the Dead begins.

Day of the Dead altars can appear in public plazas, in schools, and even in competitions, but the most important altar appears in the individual household. This altar becomes a sacred precinct or a ceremonial center within the home made up of at least ten kinds of objects—breads, sweets, cooked dishes, delicacies, fruits and vegetables, liquors and liquids, flowers and plants, clothing, adornments, and (perhaps most important) pictures, images, and statues. These pictures and statues are usually placed in a retablo (a structure forming the back of the altar), where images of the Virgin, Christ, the cross, and saints watch over the ofrenda, or offering to the dead. This offering takes the shape of a feast for the spirits of the dead, who will return and be nourished on specific nights during the Day of the Dead. Cooked dishes, liquids, finger foods, loaves of pan de muertos (bread of the dead), candied fruits, tamales, bananas, and oranges constitute the bulk of the offering. The most impressive objects of the ofrenda are crystallized sugar skulls of different sizes and with various kinds of decorations. These skulls represent the dead infants, children, and adults being honored that year.

Currently, there is a resurgence of these practices in Mexico and in Mexican American communities. In the United States, Mexican Americans have increasingly used Day of the Dead rituals to focus attention on socioeconomic issues. Grand public altars to honor the dead, elaborate decoration of graves and dramatic rituals attract public audiences and media coverage, creating a medium for communicating political messages to the living via commemoration of the dead, whose causes of death, such as drugs and violence, are highlighted.

-Adapted from Daily Life of the Aztecs (1998) by Scott Sessions and David Carrasco

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The History of Halloween

European Origins

The contemporary Halloween is most often said to descend from the Celtic feast of Samhain (pronounced “Sahwen”), one of the four great Quarter days in the ancient Celtic calendar. Samhain, celebrated on November 1 in the Roman calendar, was in fact the greatest of the Quarter days; it was the first day of winter and the first day of the new year. While little is known directly of Samhain in pre-Christian Ireland, the sagas that were written down by monks centuries after the conversion (circa 300 c.e.) indicate that Samhain occupied a central position in the temporal organization of that society. As a turning point, both of a new season (or quarter) of the year, and of the year itself, many beliefs and rituals accrued to the festival. Traditionally there were bonfires, and there was a general belief that during this time of transition the barriers that separated the world of the living from that of the dead were permeable. The souls of those who had died during the year traveled to the otherworld during this period. Offerings of food and drink were left for these traveling spirits.

As Ireland converted to Christianity, the older celebrations and feast days were replaced with the official holy days of the church. Nevertheless, the pre-Christian traditions were maintained, often in an uneasy relationship with Christian doctrine. For instance, the mythology of the fairy world is thought by many scholars to be an adaptation of older Celtic myth to the new conditions. November 1 was celebrated as All Saints Day or All Hallows Day beginning in the seventh century, and November 2 became All Souls Day in the tenth century. These days of the dead may have been intended to redirect the pre-Christian spirituality toward church-approved devotions to all the saints who did not otherwise enjoy their own feast day, and to praying for the souls of those who had died during the previous year. However, this strategy also allowed for the continuation of many of the older beliefs and practices. The Eve of All Hallows, known by many names, including Halleve, Holy Eve, and Hallowe’en, became (or continued as) an important annual festival of family, both living and deceased.

Halloween in Ireland is also a time for family reunions and feasts. It is similar to the American Thanksgiving in this regard. The Irish equivalent to trick-or-treating, Halloween rhyming, is done in the weeks prior to Halloween, leaving the night itself open to family get-togethers. Due to its perceived origins in ancient Celtic traditions, and its position as one of the four great Quarter days, Halloween remains a major festival in contemporary Ireland.

Halloween Comes to the U.S.

It is said that when millions of Irish people immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century, fleeing the potato famine, they brought their Halloween traditions with them. Earlier Irish immigrants, including the Ulster Protestants who had helped colonize North America, had already introduced Halloween to the New World, but in the nineteenth century the holiday took hold as a day for parties and games, much as it had been at home. “Dunkin’” for apples, burning nuts on the hearth to predict whether a couple would have a good relationship, trying to bite an apple suspended from a string (“snap apple”) and other games and divination beliefs were joined by traditional pranks and tricks. The spirits of the dead were joined by living mischief-makers who were given license to make noise, harass homeowners, and overturn outhouses. Perhaps because of its origin as a transitional point in the old calendar, Halloween is a time out of time—a liminal period when the dead join the living; marginal creatures such as ghosts and witches roam; the future can be determined, and people are allowed to break the rules of order.

Halloween rhyming in Ireland is directly descended from earlier mumming practices. “Mumming” involves dressing in traditional disguise and processing from home to home, where a performance of some sort is rewarded with a gift of food or drink. The American analogue, trick-or-treating, is clearly influenced by the Irish model, as well as the many ritual begging customs of other peoples who came to the United States. Thought to have begun in the 1930s as a way to deflect the ever-spiraling pranking of youngsters, trick-or-treating caught on nationally after World War II, as urbanization and suburbanization grew rapidly. By the 1950s, it had all but displaced domestic parties as the primary custom of Halloween (pranking continued apace in more rural areas), and Halloween became known as a children’s holiday. However, within two decades, Halloween was appropriated by college and university students as a festival of public costuming as well as of excess. Further, in major cities such as New York, the holiday was appealing to great numbers of adults. For some time, Halloween had been utilized by groups of gay people as an occasion to publicly parade their otherwise forbidden identity. In Boston, gay men dressed as women and paraded annually, as they did in New York. Eventually the New York Halloween parade became a kind of performance art festival, joined by people of many backgrounds. Likewise, in cities throughout the country adults reclaimed Halloween as an occasion of masquerading and festivity. Many cities now are home to more than one such street festival: Washington, D.C. features one such carnivalesque occasion in the Georgetown section, comprised largely of students from the nearby university, while families with children promenade in costume along East Capitol Street on Capitol Hill.

With the growing involvement of an older generation has come the inevitable consumerism. As trick-or-treating became established, store-bought sweets gradually replaced the homemade treats such as apples and doughnuts. Storebought costumes replaced the old clothes and rags scoured from drawers at home. Today, these commercial efforts have been joined by “trick-or-treating at the mall” and among merchants, efforts that are often blatantly commercial in nature. Other Halloween customs have quickly been capitalized upon, as well. For instance, along with the street festivals, people have begun to decorate their homes extensively with assemblages of symbolic objects such as dummies, ghosts, corn stalks, and so forth. Mass-produced versions of these usually homemade objects are now found in the department stores, along with electric outdoor display lights similar to those used at Christmas.

Nevertheless, despite its increasing importance economically, Halloween remains a popular celebration that allows for inversion and political satire. Images of politicians and celebrities have joined the traditional costumes of ghouls and other evil, malevolent folk. Groups of people disguised as atomic waste—this and other contemporary plagues, such as consumer goods that have been tampered with, are all part of the parade of taboos publicly paraded at Halloween. It remains a time of danger, as attested by the legends of poisoned treats and razor blades in apples, all of which have proven untrue. If people once feared demons and vampires, today we are more likely to fear the neighbor we do not know, or the stranger who just might be an axe murderer. For all its corporatization, Halloween remains a night of festive inversion, a time when people partake in age-old customs, not because they have to, but because they want to.

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Adapted from Encyclopedia of American Holidays and National Days by Len Travers

From the chapter "Halloween" by Jack Santino

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