The Importance of Sugar Skulls

"Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them."

--George Eliot

El dia de los Muertos is not part of my cultural heritage. But every October for the past eight years I have created an alter for my dead with photographs, flowers, candles, food,  and sugar skulls. Gifts for the dead. It is not a slap dash affair either. I try to place each item with presence and purpose. There's my father-in-law's pipe, a mandolin pick and a beer for my step father, a can of sardines for the cat, my grandfather's bolo tie, and a box of Constant Comment tea for my Nana. As I carefully arrange these things, I begin to feel my dead gather around me. Time slows down, then rewinds. The smell of my nana's fresh baked dinner rolls wafts in on a breeze; the faint sound of my grandparents' baseball game on the radio, and the music from my step father's mandolin fill the room. 

When my daughter Frances was in second grade we spent one day a week "homeschooling." One of our homeschool days found us at an exhibit of Day of the Dead alters (or ofrendas) at a local museum.We were captivated by the bright colors, the humor and the personality of these creations.  Frances wrote a little report about the tradition of El dia de los Muertos in Mexico and we created our first ofrenda at home. We found a bakery that made pan de muerto (bread of the dead), we made spicy Mexican hot chocolate, and we spent an evening telling family stories about the beloved people and pets on our alter. Almost immediately I appreciated how much richer this tradition was than a typical American Halloween with its blood, gore and fear factors.

We still celebrate Halloween of course. We carve jack-o-lanterns, go trick-or-treating and eat plenty of candy. Not to worry. But we also spend an evening telling our kids family stories. Stories about how every Thanksgiving my Nana would say that her pie crust "wasn't fit to eat," or how she broke her ankle tripping over a kneeling parishioner at her church. My husband tells the kids how his dad always smoked a pipe and worked on complex scientific equations in the evenings after dinner, smoke curling around his head. We pass around one of his pipes and smell the aroma of the sweet tobacco that still lingers in the bowl. I tell them that my grandfather loved to drink Dr. Pepper and had crushes on the women on The Lawrence Welk Show. I share stories about how my step father traded his first car for a Martin guitar, and how he would play the mandolin and teach us old folk songs and sea chanteys around the campfire. Last year we remembered how we all lay on the bed with our cat Effie the night before we put her to sleep, gently petting her, telling stories about her, saying goodbye to her.

My kids are lucky. They have not yet suffered the loss of someone close to them. Other than the cat, everyone on our alter died before they were born. But this is a special time for us as a family, an opportunity to help our children see their lives in the context of a long heritage, and an opportunity for my husband and I to gather our dead around us and remember them. I hope that by taking this time every year to honor our dead, the kids will know some comfort when they do lose someone they love. 

Traditionally sugar skulls are given as gifts to both the living and the dead for el Dia de los Muertos, often with the name of the recipient written on the forehead in icing. They gently remind us that death is a part of life. Through memories, stories, and symbols, our dead come home to us.  If just for awhile. We share sweet bread and and spicy hot chocolate. And we introduce them to our children.