Google Doodle Celebrates El Día De Los Muertos, Day Of The Dead

Thursday’s Google Doodle features bones, a dog’s skeleton and colorful candles, food, skulls and papel picado in honor of the Day of the Dead celebrations or “El Día de los Muertos.” More specifically, Thursday, is All Souls’ Day while the day before, Nov. 1, was All Saints’ Day, the two make up the Day of the Dead celebration.

The holiday was officially added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity holidays, according to national Geographic. The holiday is a celebration of life and joy, while rooted in the natural life process of death. It’s a time to honor and respect dead family members with parades, parties, dancing and by making offerings.

The holiday originated with the Aztec, Toltec and Nahua people who believed that the deceased members of the family or community could return to Earth on the Day of the Dead, National Geographic reported. Today this welcoming of the spirits back to Earth is displayed through the use of alters in cemeteries or in private homes of families. The altars are adorned with flowers, candles, food, water and anything else that might welcome back the deceased the altar is set for.

As with most holidays, the Day of the Dead comes with traditions, like specific foods that are made like the bread of the dead and sugar skulls, or decorations like papel picado which is a type of decorative paper that has detailed stenciled cutouts on it. The paper is very thin and is also used on other holidays as well.

The Google Doodle is on Google homepages in the United States, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Iceland, Denmark, Hungary, the Philippines and Japan. While it’s most prominently celebrated in Mexico, celebrations happen all over the world where it’s part of people’s heritage.

Google Doodles typically celebrate or honor a holiday, event, birthday or anniversary of someone famous. The first Doodle was created about 20 years ago when the founders changed the Google logo to reflect that they’d be at the Burning Man festival. The change to the logo then became a usual occurrence. Now every year there’s a Doodle 4 Google contest for students from different age groups to participate in and submit doodles to. One lucky winner gets their doodle actually featured on Google’s page for a day. Usually the doodle is centered around a specific theme for the years’ competition. All of the previous Google Doodles can be seen in the Doodle Archive on Google.