Time to remember – Halloween and the Day of the Dead

Today – Tuesday, Oct. 31 – is Halloween, short for All Hallows’ Eve, the eve of All Saints’ (Hallows’) Day – a time when dressing up in costumes and trick-or-treating, for candy and other goodies (we hope), evoke the traditions of ancient Celtic harvest festivals and the medieval Western Church. Allhallowstide concludes with All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2. 

In Mexican and other Latin traditions, this period is known as Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a time of celebration and sugar-cane skulls (calaveras), with participants creating ofrendas, or altars, of food, beverages and marigolds to remember the dead and the Aztec antecedents of these traditions.  

Most important, as we commemorate the departed – albeit with more than a few pieces of chocolate – it brings to mind the closing lines of the 1927 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Hamden, Connecticut, resident Thornton Wilder’s poignant study of fate and the interconnectedness of all humanity: 

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”