The Sugar Skull's Smile

Aunt Bramble
Wyrdlore Society

Tonight, while you are getting ready for bed, somewhere far south a different kind of evening is just beginning, one of Halloween's cousins. It is called Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, and it comes in the first days of November, right after our own Halloween night.

In Mexico, families set up a table called an ofrenda. They put out bread, fruit, candles, and armfuls of bright orange marigolds called cempasúchil. The marigolds smell so strong and glow so orange that people say they make a little path, a glowing road that the spirits of grandmothers and grandfathers can follow home for the night.

And right there on the table, among all the flowers, sit the calaveras: the sugar skulls.

They are not scary in the least. They are made of sugar or clay, and painted every colour you can imagine, pink, gold, turquoise, orange like the marigolds themselves. Someone paints swirling flowers across the forehead, little loops and dots around the eyes, a wide bright smile across the teeth. Sometimes a family writes a name in icing across the top, the name of someone they loved and still remember.

Children get calaveras too, small sweet ones to hold and admire, because the whole point of the night is not sadness. It is remembering someone with a smile, the way you might take out an old photograph and laugh at something funny they used to say.

Out in the fields where the marigolds grow thickest, the monarch butterflies arrive too, flying all the way from the north each autumn. Some families say the butterflies carry the spirits along with them, riding home on wings the very same orange as the flowers.

So tonight, while your lantern glows on the step and the leaves lie thick underfoot, somewhere a table is being covered in marigolds and sugar skulls, waiting for someone dearly missed to come home, just for one more visit, among the people who loved them.

Aunt Bramble keeps the Society's stories for its smallest members. She has never been anywhere in a hurry, owns a very old coat with very deep pockets, and holds that a story does not have to be tidy to be true.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.