 This little item was made by my assistant, Christian Solis, who I just asked to create something along these lines - two skeletons sitting at a table eating and drinking. One of the central functions of a Day of the Dead altar is the offering of food to the deceased, so it is only natural that they should be shown enjoying their meal. After all, if you look at these two, it looks like they must be famished - you can see their ribs!
The Day of the Dead has its roots in both Catholic Spain and Mesoamerican culture. The Spanish All Souls Day coincided with an Indian festival wherein the Indians believed that the souls of their deceased relatives came back to visit them. So the Indian feast was incorporated into Catholic ritual, and it has been a big part of Mexican culture ever since. The Day of the Dead art as we know it today is embodied more than anything in the work of Guadalupe Posada. His “calaveras” Posada might have been forgotten if it were not for the attention given to him by Diego Rivera, who undertook a revival of his art and called world attention to his work and to his person. Rivera was seeking to both elevate Posada to a position of historical and attach his own shining star to Posada’s, which was a move typical of Rivera’s self promotion. By the way, for people who are not familiar with the use of skeletons and such in Mexican curanderismo and brujeria (their version of Voodoo, as it were), I will tell you some of the basics, which I learned from a curandera I know. The basic "saint" for this cult is the Santisima Muerte, a sort of skeleton Virgin Mary, and they use three colors: red, white, and black. White is to have a happy future, and that includes the issues of money and prosperity; black is to have strength against your enemies, and red is for love. 
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as they are called (literally “skeletons”), are part of a rich tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, specifically to the work of Hans Holbein the Younger, and to the work of the Danse Macabre artists. These artists used the figure of the skeleton to burlesque and lampoon the powers that be - and so did Posada, whose works were actually political cartoons that reflected a social viewpoint that was traditionally expressed in this type of art. Other artists before Posada in Mexico were also doing the same thing, and he had contemporaries who did also, and some of these persons have had their work confused with that of Posada.
