." The deceased receive orange flowers, their favorite foods and drinks and many times are even serenaded by a mariachi band playing the tunes they loved when they were alive.This celebration has nothing to do with Halloween, which is a holiday imported from the USA and that conveniently falls one day earlier, giving everybody a good excuse to party for three days in a row.
So in this year of nostalgia, I decided to follow one of the traditions of the day and build up an altar for Little Johnny.
Great idea - in theory. It’s not like I can walk into a shop in Nicosia and buy calaveritas de azucar (sugar skulls) which are a MUST in every "Day of the Death" altar. Also, Little Johnny was quite fond of antiques, antique cars and Hershey's bars, and since I am supposed to put all his favorite things on the altar so that his spirit can come to enjoy them, I was faced with quite a dilemma. There is not even one toy car in my house, and the only chocolate I found were some rather stale Easter chocolate eggs at the bottom of my fridge.Then I thought that these days pretty much everything we do is online so I thought it would be OK to make a Google Images Altar! Yes, I simply had to google “Dodge 1939”, “Ford 1928”, “Hershey’s chocolate bar”, “gramophone” and “calvera de azucar” and in less than 30 seconds I had everything I needed.
All I had to add were a few candles I have always ready for that really long bath I can never take due to the water cuts, a papier mache papaya (always had some for breakfast), a bottle of wine (he was a wine club member), some books, and, voila!
Just hope he is not too disappointed if his spirit decides to actually fly all the way from Mexico City to have a go with the real things.
Maybe I should add some more Oreo cookies just in case…
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