The Kingdom of the Sugar Skull

Happy Day of the Dead to everyone out there, whether you are living or, um, not. Like the parrot.



When I was a kid, we used to love this day, mostly because we got to gorge on sugar skulls, which are exactly what they sound like. They're little skulls, about the size of a baseball, that are wholly confectioned from sugar.

Remember when we were kids, and those sugar cubes they gave out at coffee places were the best thing ever? Well, these were sugar cubes on steroids. Imagine, if you will, a heroin addict, who, one day a year, gets to go from one 8-ball to, I guess, eight 8-balls. It's sugar skull season! Whee!

I mean, there was just so much goodness in these things. For one, they're, again, the size of a baseball. When you can eat, essentially, a baseball's worth of packed sugar, you're going to be riding that high for weeks. Literally run around the house five dozen times until you crash into a wall high. It was all my poor mother could do to peel my twitching brother and me from the ceiling.

The second part, of course, is slightly more macabre. Think of the kid who eats his animal crackers head first. See where I'm going with this? There's no greater thrill for a ten year old than to imagine, OHMYFRICKINGOD I'M EATING SOMEONE'S HEAD! BWHAHAHA. Who does that? All we were missing was Piggy and a conch shell, but it was Lord of the Flies out there. Except with pseudo-cannibalism.

My other favorite part of the holiday are the calaveritas, a tradition that, in retrospect, seems a bit, well, off. They involved writing short fictional poems about living people-- usually authority figures-- and how they would meet their untimely demise.

So, for instance, each kid in the class wrote a different poem about Ms. Margaret, and how she would die. Some would simply drop her off a cliff. Others would use a bear, a zombie or some other such agent. Falling pianos were popular, as were falling stars. Then Ms. Margaret would read all these accounts of her death, pick the best one (usually the most elaborate and gruesome death, like one where a zombie bear shoved Ms. Margaret of a cliff and then dropped the Statue of Liberty on her), and award that brilliant pupil-- what else? -- a sugar skull.

We, of course, took to writing these death limericks with gusto, and spent hours dreaming up ways to off our teachers. It was like killing Kenny, except with real people. We would write gleefully about the death of the principal, the expiration of our classmates, even the passing of the president.

Despite brilliant approximations, in America, a creative lawyer could probably characterize these calaveritas as death threats. But these were done in good faith. It's not like we really wanted the principal to be fed to a shark by clown midgets. We just, you know, could not get enough of those sugar skulls.