‘Kalag-kalag’ ritual
This has become a ritual of sorts. As All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day near, I always write about the tendency of some people to promote the celebration of Halloween instead. This can be seen in the commercialization of horror, or the fear of the dead, with the sale of Halloween costumes and other accessories.
Our celebration is, to use a Cebuano generic term, “Kalag-kalag.” In the mountain barangays, “Kalag-kalag” is celebrated like the fiesta, if not more so, because every household prepares for it. The well-off slaughters pigs while the not-so-well-off buys a cut from their neighbor’s slaughtered pig. Meaning that there is food prepared for every visitor, who are mostly relatives.
In the urban areas, the focus of the celebration are the cemeteries. That is why when you go around the metro, you will find out that the traffic is cramped only near cemeteries and loose in other areas. In the cemeteries, relatives clear and clean the graves days before in preparation for their visit there for several hours.
The manner of the celebration may differ but the goal is the same: to remember the dead and to pay homage to them, not to fear them like what Halloween promotes. We look up to the dead with reverence, that is why we flock to their graves and stay there mostly on Nov. 1.
I won’t tire writing about my first Kalag-kalag in the Cebu City mountains. It wasn’t far; I was “only” in Sitio Napo in Barangay Guadalupe in a house near the village center where the road going up the upper areas passed. I was surprised by the flow, okay trickle, of people passing the place either going up or going down. But that was on Nov. 2.
The next year, I saw for myself how the Kalag-kalag was celebrated there. On Nov. 1 the food was prepared and some of them were placed on the altar as “halad” for the departed who would come visiting. Some households even threw some food outside for the souls who, for one reason or another, could not enter the house (at least that was what one farmer told me). The prepared food were not touched yet.
The “open house” was on Nov. 2 when the mountains erupted in fiesta mode. That was when you could eat everywhere, or when every farmer invited you to their abode. Almost always, the households with the biggest number of visitors were not necessarily those with the most number of relatives but those with “unli” food. A farmer I knew miscalculated the number of visitors so that by afternoon he had to close the ancestral house and stay with the family of his son instead.
My All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day ritual in the city became set when I got married. When I was younger, we only went to the cemetery to light candles on the niches of our departed relatives and then go home. This was because the niches, stacked one above the other, provided little space to sit or loiter. So you do your thing, light candles, pray and leave.
The relatives of my wife have a mausoleum that allow families to stay longer, talk and eat together while candles are lit. This is also the setup in other mausoleums. The problem is when families get boisterous and loud or when some of their members get drunk.