Every year around this time, the shops fill up with pumpkins, fake cobwebs, and fireworks for bonfire night. And every year, it takes me back to something completely different — packing bags with my family and heading to the provinces where our ancestors are buried. For me, that is Tarlac and Pangasinan in the island of Luzon.
Growing up, this was never a one-day thing. A few days before, the whole family would make the journey home to the province. We would pack our bags and bring loads of rice cakes or what we call 'kakanin'. Meanwhile, our relatives in the province were fixing the house and the spare rooms for us to use when we arrived.
Help is hired to clean the tombs — scrubbing them down, repainting where needed, trimming the grass, clearing out old melted candles to make room for new ones. We usually arrive the day before; that would be 31st October. Once we have unloaded everything we brought with us, we all head over to the cemetery to inspect that everything is ready for the next two days - All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day.
Inspection done, we all head back to our relatives' house, and we start preparing the food that we will bring to the cemetery, or as my aunt calls it, Campo Santo.
On the day itself, everyone arrives with flowers, candles, and food — the favourite dishes of whoever we've lost. When I was small it was mostly rice cakes, biko and bibingka, left by the tomb as an offering. None of that gets eaten — it's for the ancestors, not us.
But there's always a second batch of the same rice cakes that the family actually eats and shares while we're there. These days, full feasts also turn up at the cemetery — adobo, pancit, lechon kawali, all the food you'd normally see on a table at home. We say a prayer, sit with it for a couple of hours, and then head back to the house.
That's the bit that always makes me smile, telling people over here — adobo, the dish everyone associates with a family dinner table, ending up laid out at a graveside instead, just because it was someone's favourite. It's such a small detail, but it tells you everything about how food and family and memory are tangled together in Filipino culture. You don't stop feeding someone just because they're gone.
Then the evening turns into something else entirely. Family you haven't seen in a year arrives and everyone is catching up, more food, a few drinks, karaoke going late into the night, and — without fail — someone telling scary stories to keep the kids wide awake until the early hours. It's part grief, part reunion, part party.
Trick-or-treating has crept into the cities in more recent years, but out in the provinces, this is still the main event. It's actually a national holiday — most people get four or five days off work for it.
What's changed more recently is where all of this happens, as I was told. Families increasingly camp out at the cemetery itself now — tents, food, karaoke and all, right there among the graves. Kids run around collecting melted candle wax while the adults catch up with neighbours they only ever seem to see this time of year.
In my time, we would spend the day in the cemetery and go back to our relatives' home, and that is where we would feast and share stories. It was an occasion everyone in the family looked forward to, as not everyone sees each other often in the year.
So while the UK's lighting fireworks and carving pumpkins, back home there's karaoke drifting between the headstones and adobo cooling next to a candle.
Different countries, different ways of marking the same holiday — that this time of year is for remembering the people who came before us, loudly, with food, and without much sadness at all. This is how we do Undas.
Do you have any family traditions around this time of the year?