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Each year, Christina Cabreras, my daughter’s longtime teacher, created a common altar in a school where children would add pictures of people they had lost, along with small items that these people like: a piece of chocolate for a later big … grandfather, a ball of wool for an abandoned aunt.
Then children, parents, teachers and staff would come together to share stories to keep our loved ones alive in this way to our ancestors. It seemed so easy and easy for the little ones to glide between the worlds, as if it was just another playful activity during the day.
Last year, one of the first small gatherings I attended was with Perla Jasmeen Melendez, who guided my daughter and me in creating collages with photos of our dead and images we thought they would like. As we went through magazines, scissors and glue in hand, I was touched by the natural way I became the link in this line. I played the role of connecting the ancestors with their descendants. When the collages were ready, we wrapped our creations around the tall glass of the ‘velones’ candles and used them as colorful additions to our altar.
This year Felicia Kokocin Ruiz, author of Earth medicine, which I learned from Padma Lakshmi Taste the nation, leads an online collection focused on creating an altar for ancestors. In this class, she taught us how to bring each element into the ceremony in a way that brings the departed person back to us.
She called our altars portals to guide them home, and in the end they also felt like a portal of comfort to each of us. Each contained a candle to light the road, water to quench thirst during the long journey, a fragrant digger to create a trail of fragrance.
As a nature teacher, I enjoyed integrating these Día de los Muertos rituals into my personal nature festivals over the years. Here are three words and reflections that struck me in this way – each continues to enrich my life long after the holiday is over.
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