The Faithfully Departed

Now the internet at home is working great! Which is fortunate, since I accidentally got locked in this morning. At least I had some way to entertain myself.

Yesterday I saw a posting for my old job on one of the notice boards in the town center. It was with another posting, at the same school, for a nursery aide. So I guess someone else quit too. I felt a little guilty but not guilty enough to regret switching jobs...

...Especially since the new job is actually fun. There are a buttload of kids, but I like it. Some of the parents came around on Friday with pan de muertos (dead bread) for us, to celebrate Día de los Muertos, which is on Sunday. They had a really nice altar set up, and the computer lab teacher was dressed up as a skullhead and explained the altar to the kiddos. Some of the kids dressed up for Halloween but not a lot. I think it's a much better way to join the two holidays than what the old school had planned.

The old school had planned basically an American Halloween, without any kind of Día de los Muertos celebration. It's pretty unfortuante, since Día de los Muertos is one of those regional traditions that people from all over can look at and go - Hey! That's pretty cool!

The idea is that there is one day a year where spirits come back up to earth from the underworld. Families set up altars with pictures of their dead relatives, and their favorite foods and alcohols, so that the spirits will know they are back in the right place. They also put skulls (or skully substitutes...masks, or styrofoam skulls) and candies to attract kids to the altar. Basically, it's celebrating the cyclical nature of life and death - remembering and honoring dead loved ones, and reminding the living that they too will die. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The altars are in the houses, and then on the actual day families go to have parties in the cemetaries.

The end result is a much more relaxed attitude towards death. I think a big part of it is knowing that you won't be forgotten, that there is a special day set aside for people to remember and have fun with the memories. In Judaism, there are special religious ceremonies to remember close dead relatives a few times a year, but that's not exactly something fun or something to look forward to.