Down the Rabbit Hole: Day of the Dead Is Not Mexican Halloween

Halloween and Día de Muertos sit two days apart on the calendar, share a colour scheme, and have almost nothing to do with each other.

One is descended from a tradition of warding things off: carved turnips, disguises, bonfires, the general medieval sense that the boundary between worlds gets thin in late October and you would rather not meet whatever comes through it. It is a holiday about being frightened, and about enjoying being frightened.

The other is about laying an extra place at the table.

That is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. In Mexico, the dead are not intruders on 1 and 2 November. They are expected. The house is cleaned for them. Their favourite meal is cooked. Somebody remembers that grandad took two sugars and puts the cup out accordingly. Nobody is scared, because why would you be scared of your own grandmother.

We sell a full range of Day of The Dead mugs, so we thought we had better actually know what we were printing. Here is what we found.

Two days, two different sets of guests

It is not one day. The 1st of November is for the children — Día de los Angelitos, the little angels. The 2nd is for the adults. These map onto All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day in the Catholic calendar, which is not a coincidence and is where a lot of the argument starts.

The version you will read on every listicle goes like this: an unbroken three-thousand-year-old Aztec festival for the goddess Mictecacíhuatl, shunted by Spanish priests onto the nearest Catholic dates to make it look respectable. Neat, cinematic, and rather more confident than the evidence supports.

Historians who have actually gone looking tend to describe something messier and more interesting: Iberian Catholic All Souls' customs — graveside vigils, food for the dead, bread baked for the occasion, all of which existed perfectly happily in Spain — landing in a place with its own long-established relationship with the dead, and the two growing into each other over four centuries. Then, in the twentieth century, the result being consciously promoted as a symbol of Mexican national identity.

None of which makes it less authentic. Traditions are not less real for having a history. It just means "ancient Aztec ritual, unchanged" is a story told about the holiday rather than the holiday itself.

The ofrenda

The centre of all of it is the ofrenda — the offering. Usually tiered, built at home, and assembled with the specific dead in mind rather than death in general.

What goes on it is not decorative. Water, because the journey is long and the traveller will be thirsty. Salt, for purification. Candles to light the way. Copal incense, burned in Mesoamerica long before anyone arrived with a Bible. Papel picado, the cut tissue paper, because it moves — and movement means a spirit is in the room. Photographs of the people you are expecting. Pan de muerto, the sweet bread with bones laid across the top. And then the personal things: the cigarettes, the bottle of beer, the particular sweets somebody liked.

It is not worship. Nobody is praying to the mug of coffee. It is closer to what you do when you know someone is coming to stay and you buy the biscuits they like.

Our Ofrenda mug is the one that puts the whole altar on the ceramic — candles, marigolds, the lot. It is also, we would argue, the one that makes the most sense as an actual mug, given that a cup of something is what half of these altars are holding.

Marigolds, and the butterflies that arrive on cue

The flower is cempasúchil — the Mexican marigold, and the reason every image of this holiday is drenched in orange. The petals are scattered in paths from the road to the door to the altar, because the dead are believed to navigate by scent and colour, and cempasúchil is extremely loud in both departments. If you have ever crushed one you will know it does not smell like a flower so much as an argument.

And then there is the timing thing, which we find genuinely hard to be cynical about.

Every autumn, monarch butterflies fly several thousand kilometers from Canada and the northern United States to overwinter in the oyamel fir forests of Michoacán. They arrive, reliably, in the last days of October and the first days of November. Local tradition holds that they are the returning souls.

They are not, obviously. They are butterflies. But you can see exactly how that belief got started, and you would have to be made of stone to find it silly. That pairing — the flower and the butterfly, the two things that show up to guide everybody home — is what the Marigold & Monarch mug is doing.

Moths get a look in too. In Mexican folklore the black witch moth — big, dark, unnervingly silent — has long carried associations with death and omen, which is why a moth sits comfortably in this visual world. Ours is considerably more psychedelic than folklore strictly requires. We regret nothing.

La Catrina was a joke about snobs

Here is the one that surprised us most.

The elegant skeleton in the enormous feathered hat is the single most recognisable image of Día de Muertos on earth. She is on murals, face paint, tattoos, tote bags and, yes, our mugs. She is also barely a hundred years old, and she started as satire.

Around 1910–12, the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada etched a zinc plate of a skeleton wearing a vast French hat. He called her La Calavera Garbancera. A garbancera was a jab — a term for Mexicans who denied their indigenous roots and dressed up in imported European fashion to pass as something they were not.

The joke is brutal and about two inches deep: you can buy the hat, but underneath it you are a skeleton like everybody else. Death does not check your outfit. Posada was a political cartoonist producing cheap broadsheets for a mass audience, and this was class satire aimed squarely at people who thought they were better than their neighbours.

She did not get her name until decades later. In 1946–47, Diego Rivera painted her into his mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central — full-length this time, in a full aristocratic outfit, standing between Posada himself and Rivera as a small boy. Rivera called her La Catrina: roughly, the well-dressed lady. He took a satirical cartoon and turned her into a national icon, and it stuck so thoroughly that most people now assume she is ancient.

A hundred years old. Invented by a cartoonist. Named by a muralist. Absolutely everywhere.

She is on the La Catrina mug, and her male counterpart — El Catrín, the dandy, same joke in a suit — is on his own. They work rather well as a pair, which we assume is what Posada would have wanted, if Posada had been thinking about drinkware.

The skulls are made of sugar and have your name on them

Calaveras de azúcar are exactly that: sugar, moulded into skulls, decorated in colours that no natural skull has ever managed. The craft is called alfeñique, and the sugar-sculpting technique came over from Spain, which had it from the Moors, which is a nicely long chain of custody for something that ends up as a mug design.

The part that gets people is that the skulls have names written across the forehead — and not only the names of the dead. You give one to a living friend with their name on it. They eat it. It is a small, cheerful, completely unbothered reminder that they are going to die one day, delivered in icing.

There is no British equivalent. We would find it morbid. That is rather the point of the whole holiday.

The Colourful Sugar Skull mug is the maximalist take on this, and the Purple Sugar Skull is the quieter one — and at £9.99, the cheapest way into the range.

The Sacred Heart mug is the one where you can actually see the seam. The flaming, thorn-wrapped heart is straight Catholic iconography, sat on a skull that is doing something considerably older. Four hundred years of two traditions leaning on each other, on a cup.

The parade that a Bond film invented

Last one, and it is our favourite.

The 2015 James Bond film Spectre opens with an enormous Día de Muertos parade surging through Mexico City — giant skeleton puppets, thousands of costumed dancers, floats, the works.

No such parade existed. The production invented it wholesale for the film. The real holiday was, and largely still is, a domestic and graveside affair: families, cemeteries, candles, food, all night.

Tourists watched the film and turned up in Mexico City looking for the parade. So in October 2016, the city put one on — over a thousand performers, giant marionettes, the lot. It now happens every year and draws hundreds of thousands of people.

A tradition that is not a tradition, invented by a film crew, adopted by an entire city, and now genuinely somebody's childhood memory. Which, given everything above about how these things actually form, is almost too on the nose.

*Spectre (2015 film) via 007.com

So

Día de Muertos is the opposite of spooky. Halloween says something is out there and it wants you. Día de Muertos says somebody we loved is coming round, put the kettle on. It is a holiday built entirely on the refusal to let people be forgotten, and it is very funny about it, which is the bit that gets us.

All eight are in the Day of the Dead Mugs collection — La Catrina, El Catrín, the Ofrenda, Marigold & Monarch, Sacred Heart, the moth, and the two sugar skulls. From £9.99. If you want the rest of the dark end of the shop, the Halloween Gift Store is open, as it is in this shop all year.

Set an extra cup out. Normal is overrated.