celebration days 289huatl—“Lady of the Dead”—presided over rituals that welcomed dead
friends and ancestors back among the living. Spanish priests arriving
among the Aztecs were alarmed to find people dancing around with skel-
etons, making flowery altars, and generally making whoopee with the
memory of their deceased. This would never do. The priests tried moving
it from midsummer to November 1 and cloaking it in the Roman Catholic
aegis of All Saints Day. Surely everyone would get more from this jolly
pagan hootenanny if it were renamed and observed with droning in Latin
about an endless list of dead saints.
The date is the only part of that plan that stuck. Dia de los Muertos is
still an entirely happy ritual of remembering one’s departed loved ones,
welcoming them into the living room by means of altars covered with
photographs and other treasured things that bring memory into the pres-
ent. Families also visit cemeteries to dress up the graves. I’ve seen plots
adorned not just with fl owers but also seashells, coins, toys, the Blessed
Virgin, cigarettes, and tequila bottles. (To get everybody back, you do
what you have to do.) Then the family members set out a picnic, often
directly on top of a grave, and share reminiscences about the full cast of
beloved dead, whether lured in by the flowers or the tequila, and it’s the
best party of the year. Food is the center of this occasion, especially aro-
matic dishes that are felt to nourish spiritual presence. The one indis-
pensable food is pan de muerto, bread of the dead, a wonderfully sweet,
full-of-eggs concoction that Frida Kahlo raised to an art form. For our
own Dia de los Muertos celebration this year we cracked enough eggs to
make pan de muerto for thirty. Thus Frida took a personal hand in lifting
Lily’s debt.
Anthropologists who write about this holiday always seem surprised
by how pleasant the festivals are, despite the obvious connections with
morbidity. Most modern lives include very few days penciled onto the
calendar for talking and thinking about people we miss because they’ve
died. Death is a gulf we rarely broach, much less celebrate joyfully. By
coincidence (or actually, because of those priests again), a different, an-
cient non- Christian holiday from northern Europe is also celebrated at
the same time of year. That one is called Hallowe’en and reinforces an op-
posite tradition, characterizing death as horrifying and grotesque. Far be