The differences between Day of the Dead and Halloween

Put Day of the Dead vs. Halloween side by side, and the calendar is nearly all they share. One night hides the living from the dead. The other sets a table for them.

Halloween grew out of a night when the wall between the living and the dead was believed to thin, and the sensible response was to disguise oneself. Día de Muertos runs counter to the instinct. The dead are expected by name, and the house is cleaned before they arrive.

On this coast the distinction is sharper still. In Quintana Roo, Yucatán, and Campeche, the celebration carries a Maya name, Hanal Pixán, which translates as "food of the souls," and this year it runs from October 31 to November 2 in homes where the main dish is cooked in a pit dug in the ground. A visitor who arrives expecting Mexican Halloween will misread almost everything in front of them.

Day of the Dead vs Halloween, where they part ways

Both observances hang on the same Catholic hinge, the feasts of All Saints and All Souls on November 1 and 2, so they are cousins rather than strangers. What separates them is the direction the night faces.

• Halloween addresses the dead in general and treats them mostly as a hazard. An ofrenda addresses particular people, with their photograph on the altar and the food they liked on the plate
• A Halloween costume conceals the person inside it. The painted calavera copies the dead rather than a monster, and the figure behind that makeup began as a joke about the living
• At Halloween, the sweets move from the house to the children at the door. On an ofrenda, they move the other way, from the living to the dead, and the family eats them later
• Halloween owns the street and the doorstep. Día de Muertos owns the home altar and the grave, and the cemetery visit is the center of it rather than an extra

One is a night. The other is a calendar with its own cooking, its own flowers and, in parts of Mexico, its own language.

A Celtic new year turned into All Hallows' Eve

Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter in the Gaelic world, and with it a night when the dead were thought to move among the living. Bonfires and disguises were defensive. The point was to pass unrecognized.

Rome then overlaid the date. Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel in St. Peter's to all the saints and attached its feast to November 1; in the ninth century, Gregory IV extended the observance across the Western Church. Around 998, Odilo, the abbot of Cluny, set aside November 2 for prayers for the faithful departed, and All Souls' Day spread from France throughout Europe. The evening before all of it was All Hallows' Eve, which contracted into Halloween.

The door-to-door part came later, through souling and guising, when the poor went house to house offering prayers for the dead in exchange for soul cakes. Irish and Scottish migration brought the customs to North America, where they were adapted into a children's holiday. Britannica dates the first recorded use of the phrase trick or treat to 1927, and mass-produced costumes followed in the 1930s.

Two Mexica festivals, overwritten by the friars

On this side of the Atlantic, the chroniclers of the conquest described something that looks related. The Dominican Diego Durán and the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún both recorded Mexica festivals for the dead, two cycles of twenty days, one for children and one for adults. Their accounts conflict on many points, and both men had a stake in the answer.

Durán suspected what came next. He worried that the old feast had been folded into the Christian one rather than replaced by it. The two-tier structure certainly survived the transfer, and in most of Mexico November 1 still belongs to children who died and November 2 to adults.

UNESCO inscribed the festivity on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, following an initial proclamation in 2003, and describes it as a meeting of pre-Hispanic religious rites and Catholic feasts that also marks the close of the annual maize cycle.

Elsa Malvido traced the skeletons to medieval Europe

The ancient-origins story has a serious challenger inside Mexican scholarship.

Elsa Malvido, a historian at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia who founded its workshop on the study of death, argued that the imagery Mexicans treat as ancestral is European. Sugar skulls could not be pre-Hispanic, she pointed out, because there was no sugar in Mexico before the Spanish brought it. Skull-shaped sweets and bone-shaped bread already existed in Spain and southern Europe, and the dancing skeleton descends from the danse macabre of the late Middle Ages. Malvido went further, calling the modern holiday a Cardenist invention, assembled under President Lázaro Cárdenas between 1934 and 1940, with Catholic elements pushed aside and Indigenous iconography pushed forward.

Stanley Brandes, the Berkeley anthropologist who has studied the holiday for decades, supplies the political reading. Stressing the Indigenous character of the Day of the Dead sets Mexico apart from Spain and the United States, the two powers that dominated it. That is also where the holiday's standing opposition to Halloween was born. The contrast is partly observed and partly built.

Most historians accept an Indigenous thread. The argument is over how thick it is, and how much of what visitors photograph was assembled in the twentieth century.

La Catrina, a joke about the living

The clearest case is the face everyone paints.

José Guadalupe Posada etched her around 1910 and called her La Calavera Garbancera. Garbancera was an insult aimed at Mexicans of Indigenous descent who adopted European dress and denied where they came from, and Posada crowned the skull with a French hat and ostrich feathers to make the point land. She was satire of the living, printed on cheap broadsides for readers who got the joke. Diego Rivera gave her a body and her name in his 1947 mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, where she stands arm in arm with Posada himself.

Barely a century separates that engraving from the Catrina makeup sold to tourists in every beach town on this coast.

Mexico City's parade began with a film script

Traditions move faster than people assume, and the engine is sometimes foreign.

The opening sequence of Spectre, released in 2015, follows James Bond through an enormous Day of the Dead parade in the Zócalo. No such parade existed. Facing visitors who arrived looking for what they had seen on screen, authorities organized a real one, and Mexico City held its first Day of the Dead parade on October 29, 2016, using costumes and props modeled on the film. Lourdes Berho, then head of Mexico's tourism board, said 135,000 people were expected, according to The Associated Press.

It is now an annual fixture of skeleton marching bands and alebrije floats. Whether that counts as tradition or marketing is a live argument in Mexico, and worth holding in mind the next time someone says Día de Muertos is losing its purity to Halloween. The borrowing runs in several directions at once.

Hanal Pixán, and the dish buried in the ground

Which brings the story back to the peninsula, where the celebration looks least like Halloween and least like the postcards.

Hanal Pixán, written Janal Pixán across much of Quintana Roo, is Yucatec Maya for food of the souls, and the name is literal. Each day has its own: October 31 is U hanal palal, for the children. November 1 is U hanal nucuch uinicoob, for the adults. November 2 is U hanal pixanoob, called misa pixán in many towns, when prayers are said for all the souls.

The centerpiece is the pib, also called mukbil pollo. Mukbil means something that must be buried, and that is the method. A large corn tamal filled with chicken and pork, seasoned with achiote, wrapped in banana leaves, lowered into a pit over hot stones and covered with earth. Families start days ahead. Graves are weeded and tombs repainted before the souls come, and candles are set out to light the road from the cemetery to the house.

Oscar Mis, a teacher from Felipe Carrillo Puerto, told Mexico News Daily that the flat rectangular altar table used here "represents the plane of the earth." In the same report, he said it has become rare to find someone in their twenties who still knows the custom of guiding the souls with candles.

Other details separate the peninsula from central Mexico. The cempasúchil that buries altars in Michoacán and Oaxaca is a central Mexican flower, and the Diario de Yucatán notes it was never part of the Yucatecan tradition, even though it now turns up everywhere. Balché, the Maya ceremonial drink, and atole of new maize belong on the table, though many families now pour whatever the dead preferred in life. In Yucatán, the farewell, the biix, falls on November 8. In Pomuch, Campeche, families take their ancestors' bones from the ossuary and clean them by hand.

None of it is staged for an audience. It happens in kitchens and family plots.

On this coast, both calendars run in the same week

Tulum will keep both. Bars and beach clubs program Halloween nights for a visitor market that expects them, while on the same days families in the pueblo and in the Maya communities inland are soaking corn, digging the pit, and setting out photographs.

For a visitor, the practical part is short. An altar in a home is a place of rest for one specific person who has died, not a backdrop, and photographing it without asking is the local equivalent of walking into a wake with a camera. The cemetery on November 2 is a family visit. Painted faces are everywhere, and nobody minds a respectful guest wearing one, which is a different thing from arriving in a Catrina costume and calling it participation.

Xcaret marks the twentieth edition of its Festival de Tradiciones de Vida y Muerte from October 30 to November 2, with Guanajuato as the guest state and traditions from Quintana Roo in the same program. The other calendar needs no ticket. On October 31, the pib goes into the ground; the children are expected first, and in houses all along this coast, a plate is filled for someone whose name the family still says out loud.

Does your family keep an ofrenda, or did you grow up with Halloween instead? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.