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Festival for departed souls begins with food (cont.)
So what foods are made? You would want to provide for the spirits the very best things they loved in life, the things made with the most love and the most care. You would make their favorite dish. In Mexico, some of the best stuff you would make would be moles, tamales, because those are made for special occasions -- particularly mole because it takes so many ingredients.
It is believed that the souls of children, los angelitos, return first on Oct. 30 and 31. Toys, not-so-spicy foods and candies would be provided on la ofrenda, or separate miniature altars might be made for them with small cups, saucers, and even miniature pan de muerto.
Sweet, egg-rich "bread of the dead" (pan de muerto) is one of the constants of Dia de Los Muertos, although it varies regionally. McAllister has photos of 200 different kinds of Day of the Dead breads.
Bakeries advertise different shapes they would make. The most common is round; others might be shapes of human beings, animals, or, particularly, rabbits in profile. Some breads have anise seed. These are purchased from bakeries, which sometimes employ extra bakers to churn out great numbers of loaves to meet the demand.
Rural areas is where wheat bread is not part of the diet all year long, residents will walk or ride as far as they must to purchase pan de muerto.
In the Phoenix area, La Parissima in Glendale makes pan de muerto sprinkled with sugar, with little knobs and strips of dough on top that represent bones and skulls.
Juan Arellano is the baker and his wife, Maricela, said he learned the old family recipe for pan de muerto from his father, also a baker. Their son is the fifth generation of bakers.
"My father-in-law was from Michocan, and my husband was from Mexico City," Maricela said. "The shape my husband learned from his dad was that round shape, that and the skulls. His father's bakery was in Juarez, Chihuahua, after being in Michoacan in his youth."
In some places in Mexico, sugar skulls are treats for children during Dia de Los Muertos, sometimes with names written on them. An analogy would be chocolate Easter bunnies, Laczko pointed out, or a candy Santa.
"Another thing often on the altar are traditional liquors," she pointed out. Alcoholic mescal and pulque, and atole, a corn drink, are pre-European. A glass of water is also essential, because after the journey here, the souls are thirsty and pretty tired. Atole, a thick beverage Laczko likens to "the original power bar" for its nourishing qualities, is still used in remote communities.
Chocolate also often appears, sometimes in drinks, as does pumpkin candy, made from huge green Mexican pumpkins grown expressly for this purpose. In pre-Hispanic times, according to Patricia Quintana in Mexico's Feasts of Life, candied pumpkin was originally sweetened with honey or the sap extracted from the maguey plant.
Families clean and repaint the graves in cemeteries, which are sometimes in churchyards, sometimes in the countryside. Musicians are often hired to play the favorite songs of the departed.
"Cemeteries are wondrous places in Mexico," Laczo said. "The tombstones are close together, and are often monumental structures, both permanently and, this time of year, temporarily. These extraordinary huge arches of flowers will have pictures of the deceased set into them, and the whole gravesite repainted, and several hundred candles might be set up, and food set up. In the night vigil, whole families sit around the tombstones, and often mariachis or local musicians will go from gravesite to gravesite and play the favorite songs of the person. It's sort of quiet, but people are talking and visiting. The priest is often there, and will go and say prayers with each family.
"At night, it is alive with the flickering of candles, and all this smelling of the copa, the overwhelming scent of the flowers, it's heady, almost. There's so much aroma there," Laczko remembered.
Women spend days working armloads of flowers into breathtakingly elaborate installations, she said. She was afraid she might offend people by taking photographs, so she asked a family for permission, and they were quite flattered. The family at the next gravesite said, "Don't you think ours are beautiful?"
"So there's tremendous pride," Laczko said. "Americans have no idea of how overwhelmingly beautiful this is. And to do all this work, it really is an honoring of that person."