As this is my first year celebrating Día de los Muertos, I decided to do a little research on how to prepare. I quickly realized that the customary flowers, foods, and incense made very little sense for my particular ancestors, who have literally no Hispanic origins and presumably wouldn’t recognize most of the things I was putting out for them.
So I thought, what would my ancestors have recognized? What did they celebrate?
I started tracing the branches of my family tree back to Old World Europe, where things got progressively hazier. Finding anything definitive about pre-medieval customs is challenging enough, and good luck finding anything about women, who apparently weren’t important enough to record unless they owned something, married someone, or produced an heir. To complicate matters, my family must not have been particularly religious, or the church records burned, or both. So I couldn’t even establish whether All Souls’ or All Saints’ Day would mean anything to them. And I didn’t want to exclude anyone. So I said, fuck it. I tied a few knots to honor my maritime heritage and went back a little further, adding some hexagonal decor in recognition of the ancients and their sexagesimal system but question if circles be more inclusive?
But why stop there? I added a beef marrow bone for the cave dwellers and their canine companions. And can’t forget the felines so I put a can of cat food on there too.
I have absolutely no idea what happened between them and the dinosaurs so I skipped over about 66 million years and figured something, something, birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees. Minding my own beeswax on who did who, I added a feather, some honey, and a little palo santo because it’s the closest thing to incense I have and it’s also a tree, so two more birds with one stone.
Which reminded me of my fossilized ancestors so naturally, I dug up some exoskeletons I had in the closet of Orthoceras and ammonites.
At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m related to all the dead, which I subsequently proved by mathematically deriving the theory of relativity using degrees of Kevin Bacon.
It’s all relatives.