Tonight trick or treaters will swarm the city's streets as part of Halloween festivities. Over the past 15 years, Belizeans have adopted this North American celebration and made it their own. But before Halloween, there was the 'Dia de Los Muertos,' the day of the dead, something like Halloween without the costumes and the sweets, but with the souls of the departed and the saints.
So tonight while trick ort treaters patrol the city streets looking for "money or sweet", the Mestizo and Mayan cultures of Northern and Western Belize will observe the celebration of Finados and the Hanal Pixan and that means setting up an altar of the dead. We visited the House of Culture where curator Froyla Salam explained the celebration.
Froyla Salam,
"Its just to highlight the fact that there's more to Halloween than just what we see on American television. It is a celebration of the dead and it goes back 500 years and more ago. For example Hanal Pixan is an indigenous practice whereby when the spirits die, we don't think they have left this world, they come back and on a special occasion we feed them. We give them food, we give them drinks, and things that they particularly like to eat when they were alive.
We have two altars. One of them is for the adult dead and the other is for the baby dead. So the children's altar has things that kids like: chocolate, biscuit, baby bottle. The adult altar would have alcohol, rum, gin, and fruits, bread. So things that an adult person would enjoy eating are what would be on their altar."
The shows will be open up until November 30th.
7NEWS produced for broadcast by News Director Jules Vasquez
Edited and Prepared for the internet by Keith Swift
