With the arrival of autumn, some areas of the islands become cooler while the chestnut trees give hedgehogs on top and white coves at their feet.
From a very young age, the Day of the Dead was a special occasion to get together as a family and ask about the people who lived in ocher and black photos: ladies with handkerchiefs, men with puppies and children wrapped in baptism suits and who never grew up .
Next to my grandparents' house there was growing, and is still growing, a tree from which we used the fallen chestnuts to roast them as soon as the sun went down.
During the mornings from October 31 to November 02, the main patio was filled with buckets of fresh and colorful flowers. The smell of chrysanthemum accompanies me even today like the perfume for those who have already left.
Writer @loretosocorro
After the women returned from cleaning and decorating the tombstones and niches, the little people used to run from house to house, in groups, "asking for the saints." The bag was being filled with almonds to be crushed, figs, raisins ... and over the years, from time to time, new and more modern delicacies appeared: cubanitos, Maria cookies or cream candies.
The forced family separation, due to internal migration, was interrupted with this reunion full of solemnity and joy alike.
My grandfather, the son of a muleteer, boasted of carefully raising the best pigs in the country. At midmorning the children would take us to play under lock and key, so as not to see anything, and when it came out the commotion around the kitchen was something worth remembering. Feet and hands to the sound of quick conversations, cutting meat to cook at night, another little time to salt and keep for a longer time -ribs, chops, clean meat ... -, pork rinds, pieces of bacon put in glass jars ... and, for Of course, portions wrapped in cartridges to distribute to neighbors, who were also family or almost. In exchange, the grandfather used to receive a bottle of wine or homemade liquor, sometimes honey rum and other times herbal concoction.
My grandmother was glad that autumn filled the air of the cave with words from other grandmothers, great-grandmothers, aunts and uncles who lived before and who did such important things as traveling to America or saving lives acting as healers, midwives ... or hiding someone good who escaped a bad fate.
Little trunks of family secrets. Chests whose keys were and are the naked words.
Today there is a generation that has grown up with Halloween for those who "Halloween is a lifetime". And they are right because for them and for them it is something they have known since kindergarten. Sometimes for fashion and for accumulating the more parties the better and other times to enhance the learning of the English language.
When I hear or read about the unconditional defense of the Finaos against these "invasions" it strikes me that loving traditions can coexist with accepting and enjoying many new ones. What's more: What if the virulence with which the celebration of Halloween has been imposed was the trigger for the fight to maintain the Finaos in recent years, which were relegated to rural areas, long before this American semi-carnival will reach the islands?
On the other hand, it is not good to forget that death unites us all mortals. Throughout the planet, in one way or another, cults are held around death and, in autumn, due to the seasonal changes, various rites are performed with death and the cult of our disappeared beings as the main axis. .
It is said that the Samahín -the mother of Halloween- of the Celts is a moment in which the world of the living and the non-living intersects. Like the Canarian Finaos, it was important to meet as a family and pay tribute to those who had left.
Honoring the deceased by talking about them, sharing meals, lighting candles to light the way or singing to the souls with a pitiful banana is part of Canarian popular culture. If other cultures use masks, it is because originally they thought that in this way they kept evil spirits away, just as our little red ribbons do against the evil eye.
Our Finaos have evolved from those family and intimate gatherings to the current celebrations with parties and folklore in public squares, to taste hundreds of kilos of chestnuts. For the most part, the deceased of the family are not remembered although something new is built around the tradition.
What's wrong with accepting that those primitive Halloween masks are now costumes, parties, and parades? Don't we do something similar, a little twist on that tradition to keep it alive?
It is possible to have a party with scary stories, costumes, a brazier full of chestnuts and talk about the people who were part of our life. In the Canary Islands we have the ability to welcome and adapt the most varied of customs and festivals without losing ours.
If we can choose why to give up one of them. Between Halloween and Finaos I keep «FinaWeen»… Give me both!
