"better to die on your feet than live on your knees"

This sign is on posters all over Cholula where we are today, with happy dancing skeletons. Getting ready for Day of the Dead is a very happy time it seems. People are starting to buy the beautiful papercut designs in all colors featuring dancing, marrying, guitar playing, cockfighting and kissing skeletons, and also buying little decorative loaves of bread and huge armsfull of golden marigolds and a deep rose flower called velvet or something like that.
We have not yet seen people setting up many altars in their homes, we'll go to a village where they invite you in to see them on Wednesday, but in the local police station/town hall there are groups setting them up. There is a high table with photos and candles and many Objects that the person treasured or sometimes there's a theme, and the floor in front can have designs made of petals and seed pods and then paper cuts hang everywhere.
The tables are also laden with sugar and chocolate figurines. So today we went into a huge tent in the main square that sells all these things: sugar figures, panoramas with skeletons in action, strands of cut paper, and lately some goulish elements also brought in from our own Halloween. But mostly here the days of the dead are still a time of laughter and fondness, skeletons are friends not threatening and it seems it would be more fun to be on your feet as a happy inhabitant of the skeletal afterlife than live on your knees here. To Mexicans death seems to be a time of joy, without a hint of hell fire or damnation, you get to drink and frolic and dance and play the ukulele or guitar.