Sugar and bones
I love Halloween. I love the Day of the Dead. At least, right now, this year, I am absolutely loving them.
They mean a holiday.
They mean the annual Halloween/Day of the Dead market, bustling and brilliantly lit and brilliantly coloured and brilliantly exuberant in the suddenly-dark evenings. Day of the Dead sugar skulls, colourful paper flags, grinning articulated cardboard skeletons in all kinds of costumes (an irreverent memento mori), sugary pan de muertos, candles, orange marigolds for the ofrendas for the dead, and everywhere the smoke and scent of frankincense… competing with Halloween pumpkins and rubber bats and spiders on strings, face paint and sparkly nail polish and fake blood and cheap black lipstick, witches’ hats, Morticia wigs, stripy tights, children’s costumes (skeletons, Wednesday Addams [‘Merlina’], all kinds of weird-looking versions of Jack the Skeleton King…), scary and sometimes beautiful masks, strings of decorations with ghosts and spiders and witches in black and white and orange, devil horns and vampire fangs…
They mean I can wear these legwarmers without feeling silly:
They mean trick-or-treating on campus—getting a sugar high from mango-flavoured mummy lollipops and jelly spiders while my friends admire their blue tongues, bouncing around to Halloween music in Spanish, discussing costumes for tonight’s party (as usual I am much more excited about dressing up than anyone I know…), and doling out candy to the cutest trick-or-treaters I have ever seen—cheeky skeletons; serious, big-eyed Merlinas, brujitas and vampiras; and round babies snuggled into round pumpkin costumes! And then going into town for heaps Chinese food because it’s not an ordinary day.
They mean, I hope, an awesome party tonight and an adventure tomorrow to a place famous for its celebration of the Day of the Dead, its ofrendas and vigils.
They mean feeling the skin of passed time and rational living worn a little thin, feeling a little closer to my pagan ancestors, a small awareness of the battle between fire and darkness, the annual vanquishing of the Summer King by the Winter King.
They mean a hum and a buzz in the streets that reminds me of the delicious run-up to Christmas. They mean excitement!
posted by Eloise @ 12:31 pm
9 comments
9 Comments:
OH My God, I must, one day, be in Mexico for Day of the Dead.
I am wild with jealousy!
I love the skeletons and the paper cut-outs and the whole joyous morbidity of it all - and it's fantastic when you illustrate your blog with photos.
Does Spanish have the diminutive? I'm obsessed with it at the moment because I don't get it. I think the little witches would be a good use for it though, maybe,
"Nossa! Que bruxinhas bonitinhas!"
I want a pair of the legwarmers! And most of all I want you back in the UK, E :(
¡Qué brujitas bonitas!
Pretty similar really! Does Portuguese have upside-down punctuation too? The question marks are the worst when you're writing - it feels so unnatural. I always make the effort to remember to put them in, and Spanish speakers just don't bother!
The Day of the Dead is awesome, but in most places it's a pretty low-key, family thing, and then in a few it's become an 'attraction'. I think it's pretty hard to find somewhere where it's celebrated full-out without any tourists... and definitely to get there by public transport! I opted for somewhere fairly famous, within Mexico, for the celebrations, because I wanted to see it, and it was amazing, but don't be too wild with jealousy! And I'll be happy to take a Day of the Dead trip back to Mexico with you one say!
G, being the classy bird that I am, the legwarmers came from Claire's Accessories. In the airport on the way here I think! You could try it! Hugs x
Portuguese doesn't have the upside-down question or exclamation marks, or any other odd punctuation that I've noticed. It has a variety of accents over vowels though (tildes, acute, grave and those wee hat ones I don't know the name of), all of which are hard to pronounce!
Eee, accents, that sounds difficult! I'll think I'll happily take upside-down punctuation over such a confusing range of accents!There's only one kind of accent in Spanish, and a lot of people don't bother anyway (like in text messages and emails).
By the way, I recently discovered the word "portunol" - like Spanglish or franglais. It's the mess you get when Spanish speakers think they can speak Portuguese if they do a funny accent, and vice versa... it makes me chuckle!
Ah, so you escape all the vowel pronunciation weirdness in Spanish that I am trying to learn in Portuguese. Lucky you! A typical example is the difference between grandpa, which is "avô" and gramdma, which is "avó". All in the "o" sound. And plurals for words that end in "ão", which can be
"-ãos" or "-ães" or "-ões" and there's no rule to tell you which and they are all strange, difficult, nasal sounds.
Hmmm, the more I learn about Portuguese the more I love Spanish!
There's so few vowel sounds in Spanish. I'm currently teaching English to some of the staff where I work, and they just can't hear some of the English vowel sounds, because they don't exist in Spanish. Oh the fun we've had with the short "i"!
I wonder if they have the same problems as every Portuguese native speaker I know with the differences between:
chip
ship
sheep
sheet
P and t are fine, and I think ch and sh are OK, but i and ee (and e and various other subtly different vowel sounds) are definitely a problem. The funniest time was when I was trying to teach a friend the difference between "heart", "hurt", and "hard" - that short u is a bugger as well! But it's funny, Portuguese and Spanish are so similar but I get the impression the vowel sounds are really different. Pronunciation is pretty much never an issue in Spanish once you get the hang of it - though I still can't roll my rs properly for the life of me!
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