¡Feliz Día de los Muertos! This is the kind of holiday (All Souls Day in other cultures) that seems to those who are outsiders to Mexican culture to be a strange combination of the festive and the morbid. If it wasn't real and you made it up, some people would not find it believable, I am sure. If you are not familiar with the holiday and its imagery, do an image search or check out this
site. (Of course, you can get your discursive fix over on
Wikipedia.) Mythopoets should not be afraid to take inspiration from real life to develop the holidays appropriate to the cultuses of various religions, and some should be sufficiently over-the-top to stand out while fitting the figures or themes under consideration.
The Day of the Dead reminds me of my favorite scene in M. A. R. Barker's
The Man of Gold. Below are two pages from that scene to put you in a morbid mood. If you haven't read or don't own a copy of this first
Tékumel book, and this scene doesn't convince you to fix that, nothing will! In the scene, the protagonist is taken to the temple of the god of the dead to behold the liturgy of his worshipers.
