It was getting cold as we wound our way up the hill. We didn’t have a place to stay, and intended to stay up all night, as most of the Mexicans were clearly planning. In the cemetery, a small flat space chunked out of the hillside and crowded with plots, locals were starting to gather at gravesides, raising big wreaths of flowers and lighting candles.
– my trip to Patzcuaro for el Día de los Muertos.
Read the rest of that visit here.
The pic above is a (never-before-revealed!) picture of my travel buddies at the time getting some food on the island at about 3am. The stone street whose steps we are sitting on is the one that winds all the way up the island to its peak.
Had a good Halloween, too. The knifeman brought the party, like he does every single year. Some unexpected faces there too, great to see them. Mostly I like Halloween. My reservations are entirely due to the fact it doesn’t quite fit here in NZ – the time of year is all wrong, for a start – and it isn’t integrated into our culture in any meaningful way. There’s a lot of suspicion, in particular, as to this “trick or treat” business where children proceed from house to house and ask for sweets! AND THEY DON’T EVEN NEED TO WORK FOR THEM! The logic of trick or treating is founded in ritual, not production-based education, and that’s a bit of a hard sell around these parts – we’re leery of the rituals we do own, and adopting new ones doesn’t come easy. Nevertheless, I like trick or treating in principle. If you want to bind communities together and encourage neighbourliness, dressing little kids as monsters and giving them treats seems like a pretty fun way to do it.
Then again, I mostly learned about Halloween from Peanuts. “I got a rock.”
I’m all for increasing neighbourliness, but I for one don’t like the principle of sending your children onto other peoples property to beg for alms while threatening mischief (the trick). I’d also be more interested in Halloween if people had any idea of what they were celebrating (my own understanding is far from clear…).
You’re right about Halloween not being integrated into our culture. We seem to have adopted the commercialised cash cow version rather than one with any meaning to participants.
There’s a great Kid Koala track where he scratches up that Charlie Brown episode, making great mileage of the fact “I got a rock” and “I gotta rock” sound the same.