How global festivals celebrate life, death, and memory

As the days become shorter and nights longer, and autumn gives way to winter, the world lights up with myriad festivals that celebrate everything from the spooky and mysterious to the conquest of good over evil. While they take different forms and embrace unique rituals, at their core we find familiar beliefs of community, family, respect and tradition.

Every year, Halloween kicks off this slate of light-bearing celebrations — that grand western holiday with its costumes, treats, kooky pumpkins and occasional jousts with the macabre.

Interestingly, modern Halloween is a combination of inherited practices from festivals like All Hallows’ Eve and the Celtic Samhain. But there are countless indigenous events around the world still prevalent that celebrate the otherworldly. The Latin American Day of the Dead or the Asian Hungry Ghost festival are some of the more famous ones, while others include Obon in Japan, or Bhoot Chaturdashi in Bengal.

“All humans belong on our planet and all peoples and cultures are connected to the natural world, to place, and the seasonal cycle,” says folklorist and scholar of religions Dr Jenny Butler. “Every culture has traditions to do with time passing, and in my mind, we’re all the same, making meaning of our world differently.”

The annual celebration of all things scary is a blend of ancient Celtic traditions and Christian rituals, that is, of Samhain and All Saints’ Day or All Hallows’ Day, and All Hallows’ Eve. In the mid-1700s, All Hallows’ Eve became Hallowe’en, and today it incorporates different cultural traditions in its globalised form. These, in huge part, include the Irish tradition of Samhain, which is celebrated on the same day as Halloween. Samhain was observed across the Celtic regions, and after Ireland was Christianised, the customs of All Saints’ Day and Samhain amalgamated into what’s Halloween today.

“When the Irish emigrated to the US during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, for example, they brought their traditions with them such as carving scary faces into turnips and putting a candle in them to bring around as jack-o-lanterns,” says Butler. “In America, pumpkins were used instead.”

Samhain traditions of trick-or-treating and guising (wearing masks, animal skin and disguises), which evolved into the contemporary practice of costumery, are some of the key characteristics of Halloween.

But while Halloween exists as a blend of two different ideologies — Samhain, where the dead return and Christianity, where the dead go to Heaven — other indigenous festivals truly welcome and celebrate those who are gone, and prayers and offerings are meant to comfort them. While there is an element of fear and spookiness from the unknown and the thinned veil between the living and dead worlds, in large parts, it is nowhere as macabre, and horror filled as with Halloween.

“What’s interesting in East Asia is that we have a much more nuanced relationship to ghosts,” says Chinese-Indonesian artist and theatremaker Elisabeth Gunawan, who created the play Prayers for a Hungry Ghost. “In the West, people tend to see ghosts as disturbing or threatening, or something we have to control.”

“I also think the notion of ghosts in different cultures are tied to the way we deal with erasures and history, and the things we don’t like to think about.”

Similarly, Dia de Los Muertos or the Day of the Dead festival in Latin America, most prominent in Mexico, is a celebration of those who’ve left us and establishing a connection with them, rather than a sombre, distant event.

“We don’t see the dead in a sad way,” says Chef Josue Mendoza, a Guadalajara-native who runs the Dubai-based eatery Tacos Los Hermanos with his brother Isaac. “It’s a celebration of the good things about the people we’ve loved, and the joyous moments we’ve spent together. And it’s a way to show them that we still love them.”

The common thread between all these festivals and cultures is the concept of offerings for the ghosts of the departed. No celebration is complete without putting out food and drinks that people love, and sharing them with others as an homage to one’s ancestors.

In Chinese culture, for example, the world of the dead is considered to mirror the world of the living, so a huge aspect of the Hungry Ghost festival is to burn paper money, or papier mache versions of modern creature comforts like phones, houses, cars, and designer bags so that loved ones have all of it in the afterlife. “You really feel it because even as you’re walking down the streets, you see people putting out pyres of burning offerings and leaving out offerings of food and water,” says Gunawan.

“In Singapore, for example, during makeshift concerts or events, first row seats are left empty for the ghosts.”

Food, of course, makes for a huge chunk of the festivities. Where in Indonesia, offerings can include coffee, palm sugar and cigarettes ¬ because “ghosts like to smoke”, Butler says nuts and fruit like hazelnuts, peanuts, oranges and apples are a traditional part of Samhain. There are games like putting two hazelnuts in a fire grate to predict the futures of couples, and bobbing for apples, which is much more common today.

In some parts of Ireland, plates of food are left out for dead relatives who return to the house on Samhain, which is called dumb supper, Butler adds. Barmbrack, a dry fruit bread, is everywhere, with unique items baked in such as rings, coins, peas and cloth, which are believed to indicate the fortune of the person who finds them.

In Mexico, for Day of the Dead, altars are built in every home with images of people who’re gone, decorated with lots of flowers and candles and candies.

“What I remember most is everyone just hanging around the communal kitchen on the farm, eating, drinking cactus juice, and cooking together,” says Mendoza. There’s always a lot of pan de muerto, a traditional sweet bread baked with anise, orange flower water, cinnamon or sesame depending on the region, and hot chocolate without milk, or atole (cocoa mixed with corn dough) for company.

Whatever one chooses to celebrate, “there is always more that connects us than divides us”, says Butler.

Gunawan believes in offering through prayer or meditation. “It’s important that we think about those who’re gone and be compassionate towards them.”

As they say, memories keep us alive. In that spirit, happy Halloween!