Dia De Los Muertos - The Day of the Dead

To some it may seem strange that we picked our wedding date around a festival commemorating the dead, and I can understand this initial response. A wedding is all about new beginnings and starting a life with someone, so why would we want to begin the week before our wedding with a celebration honoring the dead?

The most simple answer is that I've always wanted to see it. The more complex one will need a bit of background information.

The Mexican Day of the Dead festival has a connection to both All Saint's Day (Nov. 1st) and All Soul's Day (Nov. 2nd), festivals that we may be more familiar with as Americans, but its roots can be traced back to the indigenous Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Mexican or Aztec, Maya P'urhepecha and Totonac. The rituals created by these peoples, celebrating the deaths and lives of ancestors, have now been observed for 3,000 years and used to span an entire month. Today's modern incarnation of the festival is a two day event in which Mexican families gather to remember their loved ones who have passed.

On these days the souls of the dead are believed to be much closer to the land of the living, and to honor this proximity families and friends visit the graves of their departed loved ones. With them they sometimes bring the favorite foods and drinks of those lost or photos and memorabilia; all to encourage a visit from their souls. The visits can often be a source of great joy and humor, in which funny stories are recounted and anecdotes about the dead are told.

The most common symbol of the festival is the skull or skeleton, locally referred to as a calavera. You can see two at the top of this very page. Calaveras are exchanged or given as gifts, and can be figurines, masks (calacas) or sugary/chocolate confections.

During this time the graves are usually cleaned and altars are built to be adorned with hundreds of marigolds. Public schools build altars, government squares are decorated, poets compose works specifically for the festival, parades fill city streets. It is a nationwide event with traditions that vary from town to town across Mexico, but in everything I have read the heart of the festivities seems to remain constant. It is a time of joy and reverence, a time to remember and celebrate the lives of those passed.

Learning about this as an American is particularly remarkable. We are immersed in a culture that teaches us to evade and outsmart death by any means possible. Wrinkle smoothing lotions, hair dyes, cosmetic surgeries... we've made an industry out of it, but even beyond the commercialism (which is another point entirely) I think this is emblematic of our attitude toward death and getting old. It isn't something we embrace as a culture; we evade it.

Our response is not to run into the streets dancing, surrounded by costumed skeletons and brightly colored altars honoring our dead. We honor our dead with much more subdued and melancholy ceremonies, and often it seems that we are more focused on the death itself than the life that was lived. Of course this isn't universally true, but I am speaking only of cultural generalities- thinking mostly of our movies and books. We grieve differently and perhaps in a way that works best for our society, but oh how I admire the Mexican (and Brazilian, Guatemalan, Ecuadorian and on and on) traditions and sentiments. Death is a part of life, and ultimately isn't life worth celebrating even in death?