Halloween, take 2

As you know from my previous post, we PCVs celebrated Halloween a couple of weeks early at the beach. Therefore, when the actual day rolled around, while there wasn’t anything going on amongst us volunteers, I did get a chance to celebrate in my site.

The day before Halloween, I decided to give a Halloween presentation to the 7^th grade class at the school. The presentation was very brief – I showed some pictures of my brother and I dressed up from when we were little, talked about trick-or-treating, costume parties, and haunted houses, and gave out a mountain of candy. Then, we did a little art project making masks for Halloween. We used the powdery papery stringy stuff that is used to make casts, and the kids molded it to their faces, creating face-shaped masks. Then, on Halloween day, they came back to the school and painted their masks for Halloween. The masks came out pretty cool, and the kids had a lot of fun.

November 2^nd is Dia de los Difuntos (Day of the Deceased/All Soul’s Day) down here. I wrote about it last year, but once again this year I went to the graveyard to put flowers on the graves of deceased family members with my host family. However, this year on November 1^st I participated in a new activity that I had never heard of before. While there aren’t our traditional orange pumpkins down here, they do have ayote (squash), and the evening of November 1^st is the time to go out and “pedir ayote” (ask for squash) – or basically, salvo trick-or-treating. All the houses in our neighborhood cooked up giant pots of ayote dulce (chunks of squash cooked for hours with sugar), and then at around 6:30 we left our houses in groups and went from house to house demanding this ayote upon threat of eternal damnation. When we arrived at a house, we would all chant “Animos somos/Del cielo venimos/Ayote pedimos/Si no nos da/Al infierno iran” (We are spirits/we come from the sky/we ask for squash/if you don’t give it to us/you’ll go to hell). We marched from house to house collecting our steaming chunks of sweet squash in a black plastic bag, getting tamales and coffee at some houses instead, until our bags were literally bursting at the seams. It was really fun to go out with the kids in my neighborhood, and definitely was an interesting spin on the normal trick-or-treat. Also, it appears that my neighborhood may be the only place that they actually do this…no one did it in San Vicente last year, and none of my PCV friends have heard of it, either.

Then, the 2^nd was the traditional trip to the graveyard to leave flowers for the deceased. I went to the Lolotiquillo (town over) cemetery with Irma and Lucia to decorate the graves of Irma’s mother and sister. Same as the year before in San Vicente, the graveyard was packed to the gills with people, flowers (artificial and real) and vendors of all sorts of goods. There were women wandering around selling popsicles, fruit, pupusas, and soda, as well as packs of young boys travelling around with cans of oil paint and paint brushes, offering to touch up your grave for you ($0.75 to paint your cross, an extra quarter to paint the person’s name on it, too).  The traditional gravestone here is a painted cement cross, which is rarely engraved with name and dates, so every year on Dia de los Difuntos relatives pay to have the cross re-painted. Dia de los Difuntos remains one of my favorite holidays down here. 

Happy Halloween!

Lucia, Irma and I enflorando

Lolotiquillo cemetery on Dia de los Difuntos