There’s something about this time of year that invites both unease and comfort. Across continents, the days grow shorter, shadows lengthen, and every light — a streetlamp, a diya, a row of jack-o’-lanterns — seems to burn against the deepening dark.
Whether in the backstreets of Mexico or the lanes of Chennai, it is the season when people, for reasons older than memory, feel the veil between worlds thinning.
It’s in this charged atmosphere that two of the world’s most iconic festivals come alive: Halloween, with its riot of costumes and midnight mischief, and Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, a celebration of memory, steeped in marigolds and flame.
At first glance, they look like distant cousins at best. One is a carnival of fright, the other a family reunion with ghosts. However, both arise from the same human impulse, the need to reckon with death not as a stranger, but as a companion who walks beside us all.
From harvest to haunting
Anthropologists remind us that festivals rooted in the end of autumn are attempts to make sense of nature’s retreat. Crops are gathered, fields are bare, and there’s a primal awareness that life, for now, yields to sleep and decay. It was from these ancient harvest rites that Halloween took shape in the West.
Its roots lie in the Celtic festival of Samhain, a ritual observed in Ireland and Scotland over two thousand years ago, when people believed the boundary between the living and the dead blurred as autumn gave way to winter. Bonfires were lit to ward off spirits, and villagers wore animal skins and masks to confuse whatever wandered in the dark.
When Christianity spread through Europe, the Church folded these customs into All Hallows’ Eve (the night before All Saints’ Day), keeping the fire but changing the prayer. Over centuries, the rituals softened further, crossing oceans with migrants, until pumpkins replaced turnips and the night became a mix of superstition, community, and play.
Today, Halloween’s thrill appears to lie in the rehearsal. By staging the terrors of the night with deliberate intent, people hope to keep them at bay. By acting out fear, we learn to master it.
Día de los Muertos, meanwhile, reaches back to the rituals of the Aztec and other pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico more than 3,000 years ago, who believed the souls of the dead returned each year to visit the living. Skulls and skeletons were symbols of memory and regeneration, not of fear.
When Spanish colonisers arrived in the sixteenth century, these ancient ceremonies were woven into the fabric of Catholic All Saints’ and All Souls’ days. Today, Día de los Muertos is a tapestry of both worlds.
Families clean graves, build altars adorned with photos, food, and papel picado — brightly coloured paper banners cut into intricate designs. They spend the night in cemeteries, singing and remembering. Death is fed, sung to, and included in the warmth of the living.
At the heart of both these festivals lies a philosophy of negotiation.
Halloween externalises fear, turning it into spectacle. Dressing up as death’s messengers, people laugh at what they cannot escape. The very act of pretending to be a ghoul or ghost is a kind of magic; if you can wear death’s mask, maybe you can outwit its touch. Trick-or-treat, too, is a bargain with the unknown, where sweets are a bribe to keep chaos at the door.
Día de los Muertos, in contrast, is about domestication rather than defiance. Here, the dead are guests, not threats. The ofrenda — an altar decked with food, flowers, and keepsakes — is set for ancestors to return and linger. Stories are told, favourite dishes cooked, marigold petals spread like breadcrumbs for wandering spirits. The festival’s joy is not in escaping death, but in collapsing the distance between worlds. This is death as a presence, rather than an absence.
Both approaches answer the same primal riddle: how do we keep living, knowing what’s coming? For some, the answer is to laugh. For others, to remember. Both are forms of courage.
Of course, these aren’t isolated customs. The impulse to reckon with death runs through human culture everywhere, including India. In Bengal, families offer pitri-tarpan by the river, sending prayers for ancestors at dawn. In Maharashtra, the lamps of Kartik pournima flicker on windowsills as winter deepens. In Tamil households, food and water are left out on amavasai nights for those who’ve gone before.
From Rajasthan to Assam, the forms differ, but the idea is constant: to honour what has passed, and to keep the memory of the dead warm against the chill.
Traditions in the age of algorithms
Unsurprisingly, the negotiation doesn’t end with ritual. In a connected, restless world, even these old customs adapt. Halloween parties spill into bars, “Day of the Dead” makeup trends on Instagram, marigold garlands become a backdrop for selfies, and skull motifs decorate coffee mugs in every mall.
Globalisation blurs borders and invites new stories, but it does also risk flattening meaning. What’s gained is exposure, a spirit of openness, a delight in mixing motifs, yes. What’s lost can be depth; remembrance replaced by aesthetics, ritual reduced to retail. The old emotional backbone of fear and reverence, of awe, risks being papered over by plastic and pixels.
In the end, the real thrill of the spooky season isn’t found in jump scares or elaborate altars. It is in the necessary courage of looking at what haunts us and choosing, year after year, to answer with colour, song, and light. Across worlds, from the bylanes of Madurai to the cemeteries of Oaxaca, we hold vigil not just for the dead, but for ourselves as well.
We humans who are stubborn, joyous, afraid, and alive.
As long as there are lamps to be lit and stories to be told, the season will return, as familiar as the dark and as precious as the light. Because the urge to tame the unknown has always been with us, whether masked in play or wrapped in memory.
