Spooky season is here, and as with most things in life, we've got options. On the one hand, there’s the notoriously sugar-obsessed celebration known as Halloween that occurs once per year, and on the other, you’ve got a two-day, sugar skull-obsessed Día de los Muertos. Sure, both celebrations involve costumes, an overindulgence of sweets, and both include their fair share of creepy corpse decor, but for the love of Michael Myers, we beg you, please stop calling Día de los Muertos the “Mexican Halloween.” In this episode we’ll draw a clear distinction between your everyday skeleton costume and the rich-in-folklore Calavera Catrina. We’ll also uncover how Halloween thrives on making the idea of death terrifying while Día de los Muertos focuses on honoring the dead—all while acknowledging that without death, there is no life. While Dia de los Muertos has various iterations throughout Latin America, all forms of the celebration are deeply rooted in a mixture of indigenous and Catholic beliefs. And in the same way the popularity of Halloween has transformed the ancient Celtic tradition into a billion-dollar industry, the Western world’s obsession with the afterlife is now hauling the ancient celebration of Día De los Muertos into the mainstream. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.