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Monday, November 05, 2018

Falling back


If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day
'Til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you 
--Time in a bottle by Jim Croce
I've had tirades about Daylight Savings Time in several posts, so I won't waste anymore time here ranting about it.

It does make everything off a bit though when we arbitrarily turn back the clocks an hour and say we now have an extra hour. Though everything seems a bit off in the world lately anyway.


We took the kids to the Phinney Ridge Community Center in Seattle on Saturday for a Day of the Dead Festival. They had a community Day of the Dead ofrenda (altar) where you could put photos of your dead ancestors to honor them. The altars are supposed to welcome the spirits of the dead back to the land of the living during the Day of the Dead celebrations. Technically that takes place on November 1 and 2 and the festival we went to was on November 3. So I have a hunch there were some pretty confused and pissed off spirits at the Phinney Ridge Community Center on Saturday.


The community center was once an elementary school built in 1904, so I imagine it has a few ghosts of its own flitting about. The place was packed to the gills for the festival and my son and I (who share introverted genes and hate crowds) were ready to leave almost as soon as we got there. But we found chairs to sit on near the door and waited patiently while my wife an daughter watched Aztec dancers with costumes that appeared to have been crafted a JoAnn Fabrics danced traditional dances to drums and conch shell horns.

I did buy some Pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, and a couple of sugar skulls to place on the ofrenda my daughter created at home for our own ancestors and dead pets. Tradition calls for placing food your ancestors once enjoyed on the altars. The bread of the dead is an easier alternative. Apparently the dead don't worry much about carbs.


And speaking of the dead, I also had to dispose of the pumpkins we'd carved for Halloween. In between squirrel attacks and torrential rain, they'd begun sporting nice mold gardens. I gave them a proper burial in our yard waste bin and they will complete the circle of life by becoming compost fertilizer for other plant life.

I also took down the Halloween lights I'd placed in the bushes around our front door. I was tempted to go ahead and put up the Christmas lights while I was out there to save time. But I figured there was always that extra hour I'd be getting when the clocks fell back on Sunday.

All things come full circle after all.


2 comments:

Helen Baggott said...

Is Day of the Dead big in America? Without you mentioning it on here, it would pass me by.

Time said...

It's mainly big with the hispanic community.