These celebrations can take a humorous tone, as celebrants remember amusing events and anecdotes about the departed. The observance falls during the Christian period of Allhallowtide. The Day of the Dead is largely seen as having a festive characteristic. Views differ on whether the festivity has indigenous pre-Hispanic roots, whether it is a more modern adaptation of an existing European tradition, or a combination of both as a manifestation of syncretism. The beginning of the Christian observance of Allhallowtide , including All Saints' Day and its vigil, as well as All Souls' Day, is observed on the same days in places like Spain and Southern Europe, and elsewhere in Christendom.
Malvido completely discards a native or even syncretic origin arguing that the tradition can be fully traced to Medieval Europe. She highlights the existence of similar traditions on the same day, not just in Spain, but in the rest of Catholic Southern Europe and Latin America such as altars for the dead, sweets in the shape of skulls and bread in the shape of bones.
Gonzalez states that, even though the "indigenous" narrative became hegemonic, the spirit of the festivity has far more in common with European traditions of Danse macabre and their allegories of life and death personified in the human skeleton to remind us the ephemeral nature of life.
He also highlights that in the 19th-century press there was little mention of the Day of the Dead in the sense that we know it today. All there was were long processions to cemeteries, sometimes ending with drunkenness. Elsa Malvido also points to the recent origin of the tradition of "velar" or staying up all night with the dead.
It resulted from the Reform Laws under the presidency of Benito Juarez which forced family pantheons out of Churches and into civil cemeteries, requiring rich families to have servants guard family possessions displayed at altars. This exclusive nationalism began to displace all other cultural perspectives, to the point that in the s the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl was officially promoted by the government as a substitute for the Spanish Three Kings tradition, with a person dressed up as the deity offering gifts to poor children.
