Editor’s note: The following article, written by our beloved Jeanne Treadway, is from the Planet Waves archives, which hosts thousands of articles and horoscopes written by Eric Francis and the Planet Waves team. We love this article so much, we post it every year.
La Catrina is the reigning queen of Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican fiesta honoring the dead. Finely dressed in an upper-class Victorian style, an oversized, feathered and flowered hat perched primly on her skull, elegant but skeletal, La Catrina was popularized by Jose Guadalupe Posada in his political lampoons of the corrupt regime of Porfirio DГaz.В Her role, then and now, is simple: She reminds us that rich or poor, famed or unknown, we all eventually become skeletons.
Dia de los Muertos is celebrated throughout Mexico and parts of the Southwest United States. Traditions vary but generally November 1, known in the Catholic world as All Saints Day, honors dead children and is frequently called Dia de los Angelitos (Day of the Little Angels).
All Souls Day, November 2, honors all ancestors. Some communities use October 28 to pay tribute to those who died a violent death, while October 29 can be a day to honor the unbaptized, and October 30 often serves as a day of remembering lonely souls.
All celebrations include building ornate altars, extended family gatherings, bountiful feasting, storytelling, and meticulous decoration of cemeteries.
HISTORY
Many cultures honor their dead with annual rituals and celebrations; often thousands of years old, these ceremonies frequently occur around the new year.
On their Lunar New Year, Asians explode tons of fireworks, burn costly shrines created to honor ancestors, and parade dragons noisily through streets. Memorial Day in the United States is a somber occasion and leans toward the militaristic; rituals include draping red, white, and blue bunting everywhere, planting flags, and intoning long lists of those who died in service to the armed forces. Celts build enormous bonfires on their new year’s eve, October 31, known as Samhain, and commune with their dead while the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest.