Halloween & Day of the Dead

Most American evangelicals have found a way to make peace with Halloween. Harvest festivals, Cinderella, Peter Pan and pumpkin costumes, trick or treating, and pumpkin carving contests have provided an alternative to the more pagan origins of Halloween.

Mexico also has a celebration around October 31.  It is called Dia de Muerto (Day of the Dead) and, at least in some people’s minds, is more challenging for evangelical Christians.  The Day of the Dead is not about dressing up in costumes and getting candy.  The traditional Day of the Dead involves three basic things:  an altar for the dead, offerings in honor of the dead and communing with dead relatives.

 Typical school Day of the Dead altar



In Mexico, that prides itself on separation of church and State, public school classes are cancelled.  In the days preceding Day of the Dead, schoolchildren construct altars in their classrooms. This creates a dilemma for many evangelical Christians.


For centuries before the arrival of the Spanairds, and Christianity, to Mexico, Mexcians celebrated a feast day in August.  The Spanish priests combined the indigenous (indian) beliefs with European Christian practice.  They gradually merged the Mictecacihuatl (goddess of death) celebration with Roman Catholic traditions of All Saints Day and All Souls Day and moved the celebration from August to November.  The result is the merged indigenous and Christian religious tradtiion celebrated in Mexico today.

The traditional altar of the dead offerings of skulls (representing death and rebirth), special bread (representing souls of the dead), incense (representing the change of the physical to the spiritual, salt & water (representing ongoing life), candles (representing light, faith and hope), and marigolds (representing the impermanence of life) have been joined with pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns and costumes (albeit devils and monster type costumes).

 U.S. Halloween influence in Mexico - Feliz Halloween (Happy Halloween)

 Kid's trick or treating: another U.S. Halloween inlfuence


Rural communities are trying to preserve the tradition in its purest form and the opposite is also true.  As Christian evangelicals have more influence in some areas, they are appealing to the Mexican Ministry of Education to not require evangelical families to participate in building an altar of the dead in the schoolroom.  The Roman Catholic church frowns on this practice but tolerates it because it is a cultural event.

So the result is that each person and family needs to decide for themselves.  In its most innocent form, Day of the Dead is merely a way to remember and honor those who have departed this world.  At its most traditional, the Day of the Dead is a time to commune with departed loved ones who return to earth on this one particular day.