by Ricardo Ávila
On Long Island, the end of October brings Halloween – a day when my children behave even younger than they are. So do some adults. Silliness and greed rule. In my Mexico City childhood, it brought El Día de los Muertos, a pause that mixed celebration with solemnity. The Day of the Dead was an adult ritual fashioned to include the participation of children.
My strongest memory of a Halloween-past in the United States is when, a few years ago, we ran out of candy and a disgruntled trick-or-treat child painted “Cheap SOB” on our front walk.
My strongest memory of a Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico is when, per custom, my parents led me to the cemetery to pay tribute to our departed with food, song, flowers and words. A majestic woman in black arrived a few graves down the row with a piano. She had it planted on top of her buried husband and delivered him a personal concert.
My one daughter and three sons welcome Halloween as an excuse to behave foolishly and beg for candy which will destroy their teeth.
For my wife Annette and I, it has become an occasion to worry about our children and others as they race mindlessly across streets, of endless dog-barking and door-knocking, of graffiti and candy wrappers to be cleaned up the morning after.
Sometime I have to take a drink to settle my uneasiness, and the alcohol doesn’t mix well with the collection of candy my children force me to share with them. It gives me indigestion and makes me reflect on the issue at hand: death.
It appears to me that death has two very different meanings in the United States and Mexico. Here it is the final act. There, it is no more than a stage of being which can bring joy and strength to life.
Mexicans are used to celebrating death from pre-Christian or pre-Columbian times.
Most Aztec celebrations included human sacrifice to please the season’s gods and bring success in war, business, matrimony, health, and other worldly affairs – even peace. The advent of Christianity did not erase such thinking. Today, as funeral processions in New Orleans become more and more rare, Mexico’s dead may still enjoy a wake surrounded by friends who relish good food and drink, music till dawn, a priest’s farewell, and a procession aplenty with brass and drums.
The Spanish conquistadors were shocked to see skulls and bones decorating temples and palaces. Yet, when they massacred the Indians, the victims didn’t condemn the act as a holocaust.
The thousands of deaths were just acts of fate, mundane passings.
Technology and IBM have not changed Mexicans’ attitudes towards the celebration of All Saints Day.
The first day is for the small dead, children who’ll dwell in limbo. Families, rich and poor, sweep their dead children’s graves and decorate them with toys, fruit, pottery and flowers. Cemeteries become splashes of color on the hillsides. The bright orange of the sempasuchitl (African marigold) can be seen for miles.
The second day is reserved for the adult dead. Los Fieles Difuntos. It is the main celebration. Some of us still carry on the pre-Christian traditions. We spend the entire night visiting the dead, offering them their favorite foods, serenading them with a hired mariachi or our own guitars, and keeping the candles burning.
Bakeries display their delicious pan de muerto (the dead’s bread) with “bones” running like spokes to its edges, sprinkled with white frosting or coconut flakes.
Families prepare dulce de calabaza (pumpkin candy); The women wash the pumpkin tejocotes (Hawthorne fruit) ; the men bring the panocha (brown sugar) from the market; the children clean the sugar-cane stalks.
Vendors in the plaza offer sugar-candy and chocolate skulls, big and little for parents to give their children – friends and lovers to exchange.
The candy skulls bear names — Lupita, Petra, Juanito, Carlos — across the forehead.
Other vendors go door-to-door hawking papier-maché masks of skulls and animals.
In newspapers, politicians are drawn with skull faces – calaveras – and ridiculed in verse. It is an exciting day for artists, writers and poets. It is an exciting day, period.
This year there will be no American Halloween at our house. Together, as family, we will bake pan de muerto; we will prepare pumpkin dessert; we will make calaveras, those personalized candy skulls, to share with each other and friends. It will be old times again.
I cannot wait to watch the expressions on the faces of Ricardo, Rafael, Laurie and David when I tell them the exciting news. Hispanic Link.
(Ricardo Avila wrote this piece, now a part of “Hispanic Link’s classic column collection,” 28 years ago. He and his wife Annette recently abandoned New York’s Long Island to retire in Rockledge, Florida. Reach them at annetteavila@cfl.rr.com). © 2006
