Dia de Los Muertos is a holiday that Mexicanas and Espanias celebrate every year on October 31st through November 2nd. It is a way of us showing our love and respect to our ancestors who built our familias the way they are now. 

We celebrate with Marigold flowers and use the marigold flower petals to lead our ancestors back home to us so their spirits can visit us and be with us for three days. We celebrate with many different foods being churros, carne asada, sopapillas, and arroz y frijoles y pollo de mexicanas. We also put out many candles to keep the mood feeling more homey and relaxing. Dia de Los Muertos is a time for family to come together and celebrate the deaths of our ancestors respectfully. 

When someone in our familia passes, there is a seperate time for mourning and a time to rejoice. During the Dia de Los Muertos, it is a time to rejoice and celebrate the family that is with us now and celebrate and thank our ancestors for building our familia to be the way they are today. There is a big fiesta with many fireworks, dancing, face paintings, performances, la musica, and food. We have a great big Ofrenda with all of our ancestors pictures, all the way back to our ta-tatarabuelos (great-great grandparents). We hang them on the wall just like a family tree and put many plates of food and offerings to them on the table, which is kept underneath their pictures. We keep many Marigold flowers onto the table and all around the Ofrenda. 

It is a very fun celebration because the whole family gets together, and it is actually very rare for the whole family to be together at the same time in the same place. It is a warm and loving celebration that not a lot of other cultures understand.  A lot of other people think of it as the “Mexican Version of Halloween”, but this is extremely false. It is actually more like Thanksgiving than Halloween if that is easier to comprehend for you. 

It is a time of love, remembrance, and food (a lot of food). It is definitely not about the horrors of this world.