Manila: As millions of Filipinos remember their departed, cemeteries and memorial parks across the country spring to life with commerce as ambulant vendors and temporary stalls try to cash-in on the long-weekend bonanza.

The All Saints’ Day observance on November 1 is a long-held tradition by Filipinos in the predominantly Catholic country where it is regarded as a public holiday.

The following day, All Soul’s Day, is also an important occasion and its significance its not lost to small entrepreneurs like Marco Agbayani who hawks his merchandise at the Tugatog Cemetery in Malabon City with vigour looking forward to better earnings over the next three days.

Agbayani sells fried street food treats such as squid balls, cocktail hotdogs, potato sticks and the like to cemetery visitors in his pushcart aluminium stall.

“November 1 and 2 are just about the only time when hawkers like me earn really good money from our sales,” he told Gulf News as he referred to the extended holiday as the third day, which falls on a Sunday, a regular non-working day.

People, from as early as 5am Friday, started to flock to the cemetery to clean the gravesite of their departed relatives and loved ones and spruce the place up by applying fresh paint on the tomb.

Night falls at the Tugatog Cemetery and the gateway to the burial ground is clogged with a crowd that hardly moves as people elbowed their way to their departed kin’s gravesite.

Tugatog Cemetery is popular among local folk as it features an unusual figure in one of the tombs. Instead of the usual epitaph or cross tomb marker, an upright statue of a pitchfork-clutching demon holding an angel.

Agbayani said this particular figure is one of the attractions at the Tugatog Cemetery.

“Few people who visit the cemetery every year will always at least glance at these unusual figures,” Agbayani said.

At the Holy Cross Memorial Park in Novaliches in suburban Quezon City, the scene of hordes of people moving to visit their relative’s gravesite is repeated.

Although Holy Cross Memorial Park is more upper class compared to the Tugatog Cemetery, the reasons for visiting during the holidays for the departed is the same — to recall memories of what was good in the person who had departed and the lessons in life he or she had taught them.

But instead of selling just squid balls on sticks, ambulant vendors at the Holy Cross also sell local hamburger and American fast food meals.

All Saints’ Day and All Souls Day commemoration is as well as is a tradition inherited by Filipinos from their Spanish colonisers, but another significance is that it brings together families who, most of the time, have very little time to see and talk to one another because of their busy lifestyles.

Filipinos would share meals with their loved ones even if they have to do it on top of the gravestones of their departed loved ones.

“It is like being with them again, eating with them and sharing good times with them,” said Agbayani.