The Addams

My maternal grandmother, lola mama, died when I was just 5 years old. Soon after, 3 years to be exact, lolo daddy followed suit. Since then, my family has been spending All Souls’ Day in La Union.

I’m not sure whether it is our love for food or fondness for get-togethers that we spend one whole day at our grandparents’ tombs every year. My family has mastered the art of finding a reason to celebrate and stuff ourselves till we could take no more. This is probably why we painstakingly brave all traffic and hassle every Halloween just to get to our beloved Agoo and spend one hot day in the cemetery with no decent washroom to speak of.

Last weekend I have come to realize how long we’ve been spending one day each year in the cemetery, despite the discomfort, when we looked at two new scrapbooks my cousin made (my cousin, I think, has developed an obsession in making scrapbooks about ourselves..more on this in another entry). There was one picture taken when we were really really young, in the cemetery, with my full bangs and sando and shorts attire. That picture sure is vintage. It may sound creepy to most people but I and my cousins have a lot of photos taken in the cemetery. I can actually see how my hairstyle and body have evolved through our All Souls’ Day pictures. We have become so familiar with the place that whenever we were on vacation and we feel the need to sneak a few puffs, the cemetery would always be a dependable place not to get caught in. We justified it by telling ourselves that our own grandma smoked herself and even made her own tabako. My grandparents’ final resting place has been remodeled time and again. There was a time when there was a grassy area and we just put up a tent to shield us from the heat. Now, everything’s cemented and we had a permanent roof built.


The best thing about all this is the food. We would have our lunch right there in the graveyard and all kinds of snacks we can bring. There was a time when one passerby asked how much is a plate of pancit because we literally had a table with all our picnic Tupperware on top. The standard lunch used to be chicken pork adobo or polpog (an Ilocano delicacy of grilled pork seasoned with pork brain) and pancit. Thank God we have grown tired of it. This last All Souls’ Day, which was yesterday, we had penne with sundried tomato and shrimp, fetuccine with olive oil and sausage and pork barbecue. For clarification, I did not influence this menu in any way. I remember killing time by solving crossword puzzles and find the word games with my cousins when I was a kid or sleeping on top of either of my grandparents’ tombs (creepy but true). I didn’t engage in playing with candle wax lest I get my hands dirty. We also played pop-com-drama, a team game where you have to sing when your team was chose to do pop, act out a commercial for com and I’m sure you already know for drama. Very silly, I know. When most of us started driving, we would ask our parents to let us go back to the house for a few minutes some time after lunch to use the bathroom. We end up going back to the cemetery two hours later because we took a nap.

So even if I had to rush to work today from a six-hour trip feeling like a zombie and all, I would never trade watching Magandang Gabi Bayan Halloween episode and spending a day at the cemetery with my cousins for anything. No matter how uncomfortable this all seems and actually feels, I always look forward to All Souls’ Day. It is one of three occasions every year that we get to spend time in the province, witness Filipino religiosity, laugh at each other and eat like there’s no tomorrow.