Today is Dia de los Muertos - the Day of the Dead. It's become extremely popular in the United States the past handful of years to the point of mass produced sugar skull costumes and decor at Target and Dollar Tree.
At the risk of sounding like a total hipster, though, I was a huge fan before it was cool.
I was first exposed to the general ideas of this holiday at a young age, thanks to Ray Bradbury's "The Halloween Tree". I still love this book and movie, and its exploration of cultural origins of various Halloween traditions around the world. Unlike most of the others, Dia de los Muertos was full of not only mourning, but of celebration, colorful altars, and an open acceptance of death.
That's where I got my explanation of Dia de los Muertos. But the actual spirit of it? I got that growing up in Texas. I saw the marigolds, and the brightly colored altars. I enjoyed the convenience of pan de muertos in the grocery store bakeries, and the colorful candy skulls. It was easy enough to ignore if you didn't care, but I cared and by High School it became the holiday I looked forward to every year.
Yeah, sure, it's about death. But it's not a holiday for mourning, it's a holiday for celebrating Life. It's about honoring your lost loved ones instead of never speaking their names again or pretending they never existed like too many of my American friends did. The dead weren't distant - they were there with us, around us, still a part our lives.
Since I moved to the East Coast, I have severely missed seeing Dia de los Muertos everywhere, as if it was just part of the landscape. So I started taking it upon myself to do more in celebration of it.
I bake my own pan de muertos. (Of which this is not a photo of, but I don't have one, so you can enjoy my autumn bread). I set up an altar in our home. I talk to my deceased loved ones.
I'm not celebrating it this year. It's the first year in five years. I feel like I've been drenched in the energy of death this whole season. I lost my grandmother in September around the same time I realized I had also lost myself, too, in the wake of childhood trauma memories crashing into me like the whole ocean.
Part of me is sad that I just can't bring myself to decorate. But I'm also glad I have been living in a space where I am able to honor both death and life as two sides of the same coin.
How about you? Do you celebrate Dia de los Muertos? Have you heard of it before? Tell me your stories!