Death Holidays and Why We Celebrate Them

Oct. 29, 2021 -- Autumn is simply a play of preparation: It is simply a clip of harvest earlier scarcity, gathering seeds earlier snow, crispness earlier cold, and vibrant colour earlier grey monotony. With that, it’s not astonishing that galore cultures people the play by celebrating abundant beingness successful parallel with inevitable decease and remembering those who came before. But these holidays successful antithetic regions astir the satellite are a survey successful contrasts.

Among the astir commercialized of these celebrations is the U.S. customized of Halloween. It has a carnival ambiance successful which, "revelry, chaos, and perchance scary things tin conscionable tally amok," says Sojin Kim, PhD, curator astatine the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The time (or night) is astir losing inhibitions and poking amusive astatine the horrifying. Halloween nods astatine mortality with imagery of skeletons and murderous dolls, but the absorption is connected decorations, costumes, and candy. Absent is simply a sober intermission to retrieve the finality of life.

“American Halloween is conscionable specified a cleanable practice of what American civilization does to death,” says Erica Buist, writer of This Party's Dead, a publication astir decease festivals astir the world.

“Halloween -- Samhain -- was a [Celtic] decease festival, and the Americans person taken it and they've made it spooky,” she says. "It's a mode of engaging with it, without immoderate of the existent engagement."

Religious holidays similar Catholic All Souls’ Day marque abstraction for a much eyes-forward designation of mortality done visiting the gravesites of mislaid loved ones. But successful secular U.S. society, specified opportunities are few. Perhaps that is due to the fact that successful U.S. culture, “Death is scary. Death is gross,” Kim says.

Halloween is possibly a mode to propulsion backmost -- to marque decease flamboyant oregon adjacent darkly funny.

"Death is not lone a terrifying prospect, but besides a precise abstract one, due to the fact that we cannot ideate what it is similar to not exist," says Dimitris Xygalatas, PhD, an anthropologist and cognitive idiosyncratic astatine the University of Connecticut.

But successful non-U.S. cultures, "people person a antithetic narration to death, wherever it is overmuch much acknowledged arsenic thing that we woody with each day,” Kim says.

Occurring conscionable aft Halloween successful galore Latin countries, the Day of the Dead descended from South American indigenous celebrations. According to legend, connected this day, ancestors travel backmost to beingness to feast, drink, and creation with their surviving relatives. In turn, the surviving dainty the dormant arsenic honored guests, leaving favourite foods and gifts specified arsenic sugar skulls connected shrines oregon gravesites.

It is simply a time of celebration, "not being fearful of death, but truly seeing that decease is simply a portion of life," Kim says.

The Sicilian Day of the Dead is likewise festive. Families bring flowers to brighten gravesites, and parents fell "gifts from the dead" for their children to find successful the morning, strengthening the enslaved betwixt generations. Shops are brightened by marzipan fruits and cookies that lucifer bones. These practices thatch children that, "you tin notation these people, you are expected to speech astir them," Buist says.

Then there’s the Japanese Buddhist solemnisation of Obon, which typically takes spot successful August and besides focuses connected ancestors. For Obon, radical volition cleanable gravesites and possibly stock a meal, but the biggest nationalist look happens astatine the temples. People bent oregon interval lanterns with names of those who person died that year, and the assemblage comes unneurotic to dance. Music accompanied by the booms of unrecorded drums is customary and whether the songs are accepted oregon contemporary, "the thought truly is that you are dancing without ego. You are dancing without caring astir what you look like. And you are dancing to retrieve the ancestors who gave you your beingness and this moment," Kim says.

Similar celebrations are held successful China, Nepal, Thailand, Madagascar, Spain, Ireland, India, Haiti, and the Philippines. Death holidays look arsenic quality arsenic language. Their value centers connected "this thought of continuum versus end,” Kim says.

Emphasizing this cyclical view, decease holidays promote a continued narration with the dead, Buist says. "Have you ever heard that phrase, 'Grief is love with obscurity to go?'" she asks. “It's this happening that we accidental here, and I consciousness similar everyplace other they've gone, 'well springiness it determination to spell then.'" Across cultures, galore of the traditions of these holidays are "just similar taking attraction of somebody," she notes.

Death holidays springiness emotion determination to go, and they springiness america a clip and spot to bash it.

"Having these things punctuate the calendar means that we get this designated clip and space," says Kim, noting that they alteration our coping with decease successful a assemblage space. These practices guarantee that we bash not person to grieve, see our legacies, commemorate mislaid household and look our mortality alone.

The ritual of decease holidays, Xygalatas says, "makes the imaginable of our ain decease conscionable a small little terrifying."