Some of the festivities include creating altars, painting and cleaning graves, making, offering, and eating delicious food, burning copal incsence and candles, and collecting and arranging marigolds; the flowers of the dead.

Calaveritas Gifts

Durring the Days of the Dead, families make special altars and "Ofrendas" in their homes dedicated to the spirits of their loved ones who have passed over. The altars are filled with offerings that gave joy to the departed person in life. The deceased loved ones favorite toys, foods, drinks, and sugar sculpture known as "alfenique" are common altar pieces.

Alfrenique is usually made in the form of small coffins, animals, plates of food, and the sugar skull or "calavera." Calaveras are decorated with colored icing and shiny paper foil for eyes. Sometimes names are written with icing on the skull and children often exchange these named skulls with their friends.

A famous icon of this holiday is the Dandy skeleton made popular through the works of master lithographer and illustrator Jose Guadalupe Posada. Posada's skeletons were of a political nature; characatures of the bougoisie durring the nineteenth century when Porfro Diaz ruled Mexico.