Day of the Dead, All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day

Dia de los Muertos Celebration

Halloween is the holiday when many of us luxuriate in scaring ourselves with spooky images, bloody movies and thoughts of razor blades in apples.  Old folks reminisce about their youthful pranks tipping over outhouses. Little kids are dressed up to be over the top cute in photographs.  To those for whom it is a religious holiday, pardon the rest of us who celebrate it secularly.

Last year Rebekah and Ben brought Rylan to my Wisdom Course Halloween party dressed as a lobster in a pot.  He was only one month old, so he fit in the pot nicely, though his parents dressed as chef and diner were a little scary.  This year he was a dinosaur, totally cute.  (Click on The Griffith Life link.) 

Hell House

Haunted Houses and corn mazes are traditional, but not so great if you tend to fall down.  I thought the nursing home next door, The Vistas, looked spooky enough.

Sometimes churches make a big deal of celebrating Halloween as All Saints Day and the children come to parties at the church dressed as biblical characters or anything that denies the paganism of the holiday.   Lose the shivers that way.







Downtown Display

 


Cowgirls Michele and Debbie

Costumes I remember from my childhood include a tiger, a cowgirl, and a harem girl dancing in the parade down Main Street.   Major excitement to dress as a hippie in high school--as though in Muscatine, Iowa we had a clue about hippies.  More like a wholesome, fun-loving gypsy girl.  Flower child, I think I told my Dad, bemused by my outfit.   In college, when I actually was something of a hippie, I dressed up like an exotic bird, with a facepaint mask and sequins.  Ooh la la.  No one recognized me, I looked so mysterious. 

Wes and Michele in Hollywood

While newlyweds, Wes and I enjoyed Halloween festivities in Hollywood dressed as a pregnant hooker and a priest (me). Many compliments. I bought Wes his first orchid.  We were still in seminary then and felt deliciously naughty.  

Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, is not an exact equivalent of Halloween.  It occurs a few days after, and it is a light-hearted yet gruesome take on death, celebrating family members who have passed on with altars, parades, sugar skulls and skeletons, and picnics in graveyards.  

Leftovers





Artists Guild

 

 





 

 



 



In the Celtic tradition, Samhain or Halloween was the beginning of the New Year and the festival in honor of the ancestors, the coming of death and the conception of new life.  Bonfires were prominent in the ritual.