Greetings all.  Hope you all are enjoying your weekend.  I wanted to share a photo of our family altar this year.  Even though we typically do not light up the alter until the 1st and 2nd of November, I wanted to share this image with you since we were talking about altars during last week's lectures.  This year was especially difficult for our family as we lost close family members to Covid as well as losing five young high school students at the high school my wife works at as a guidance technician and where I sometimes substitute teach.  I wanted to make sure that we remembered our loved ones and honored them with the work of our hands in putting together this alter.  As you can all see, we made use of papel picador in the second and third tiers of the altar, we light candles and burn copal resin for our loved ones.  We also include the cempasuchíl flower and some of the foods and candies that our loved ones liked (mazapan, ron pope, ajonjoli, cacao, beans, rice, clavos, maiz, chiles secos, aniz, and other foods).  My father in law worked at Disneyland as a groundskeeper, so I have a Mickey Mouse figure planting seeds to remember him, in particular.  If any of you create an altar for Day of the Dead, I would love for you to reply and post a picture of it.