The Day of the Dead is something I celebrate a bit earlier than everyone else.
Traditionally for me, it consumes me during the middle week of October. I’m always a bit agitated. I fall asleep with the lights on. I get restless and stuck at the same time, both introspective and prone to drowning everything out with movie marathons. I get sad, I take stock of my life, and areas I find wanting really start to piss me off. When I was younger I didn’t understand why six weeks into the semester everything would suddenly fall apart. Finally Halloween would come, and my favorite holiday would always cheer me up. After a while the pattern began to emerge… I wondered why. It became clear one day when my mother mentioned October 20th was the day my father died.
Beneath the Halloween revelry, there is a tradition of communion with those that have passed. The Celtic roots of Halloween, or Samhain, mark it as a time when the veils between the worlds are thin, making it a prime time for divination and communicating with dead family members.
Dios de la Muerte
Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations line the stores of Colorado with cartoon skeletons living life: riding bikes, getting married, getting drunk. Basically it’s one big party, when the living and the dead dance together all night because their worlds finally intersect. It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one hanging out with ghosts, and it’s more fun to celebrate it as a time of passing than to just sulk in my bedroom.
I love the caricatures of ghoulishness and the way people become who they secretly believe themselves to be, or want to become. A well-chosen costume plays on some element of the personality, drawing it out of the dark and into full glorious view. Like Batman, we embrace and identify with what terrifies us, and it makes us stronger. Or what inspires us, unnerves us, delights us. To me, it seems the perfect celebration of life.
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For an absolutely jaw dropping collection of Dia de los Muertos art go to: http://eldiadelosmuertos.tumblr.com/
For easier viewing go here: http://eldiadelosmuertos.tumblr.com/archive
(This is where I found these beautiful images.)
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How do you celebrate this time of year? What does it mean to you? Anything?
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Mysterious Artemis 