On November 1st and 2nd every year, towns and villages are filled with flowers and flavors to welcome the dead. Offerings are prepared. Cemeteries and family tombs are visited.

Offerings are never short of flowers, candles, decorative paper banners, bread, incense, skull-shaped sweets, pumpkins, cooked dishes, water, salt, toys, wine, cigars and everything else the deceased person used to enjoy when they were alive.

Offerings vary from one region to another. The festival can be celebrated at home, at the cemetery, on the ground, around a table, as a family or as a community.

It will display the work of Mexico City's cardboard artists, for whom death is a natural process.

It is a sad one due to the loss of a loved one, but it is part of the cycle of life because, as the saying goes, “It is an honest truth that only the unborn can become a calavera."

Undeniably, one of this festival's biggest attractions is the papier-mâché offering and art.

Many artists, including Adalberto Alvarez, Raymundo Amezcua, Sergio Otero and the famous Linares family, have found creative freedom in the faceless image of death. Through it, they created an endless variety of characters: street vendors, elegant women ("Catrinas"), and old and new professions, all caught up in a dance filled with tradition, form and color.

Paper, dipped in paste, is delicately placed, layer upon layer, over a wire or wicker frame, in order to shape the desired figure.

Each layer must be allowed to dry to achieve the necessary thickness and strength.