For some Los Altos students, Día de los Muertos is different this year. Here’s how they’re celebrating.

Visitors to Los Altos High School over the next few days will see the entrance festooned with bright paper decorations and colorful skull cutouts for Día de los Muertos.

Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is celebrated in Mexico and throughout Latin America as a celebration to honor the dead. It takes place Nov. 1 and 2 each year.

When there’s not an ongoing global pandemic to contend with, Los Altos High School students usually organize an event to celebrate Día de los Muertos. But with sharp restrictions on how many students can gather on campus, the club opted instead to create a display at the front of the high school, said Isabel Van Campen, a junior at Los Altos High School, who is president of the school’s Latino Student Union.

The student union is one of the larger clubs on campus and has about 60 members, she said in an interview.

This year, a group of no more than eight students worked with the high school to gain approval to set up decorations for the holiday, Van Campen said.

The display, which will be up until Tuesday, Nov. 3, is intended to engage the community, and people are invited to participate by making their own contributions to the exhibit, Van Campen said. Community members are invited to bring photographs of deceased loved ones to clip to the display or leave flowers or candles.

This year, she said, Día de los Muertos feels special. The holiday is intended as a celebration and remembrance of people who have died, and it feels particularly salient in a year when a pandemic has left so many people dead in the U.S., as well as around the world, including in Latin America, she said.

Celebrating Día de los Muertos this year may be more somber, featuring fewer parades and more focusing on the loved ones people have lost, she said.

The display dovetailed with a Halloween “Grab-and-Go” event that was scheduled Friday evening at the high school, in which students were invited to drive, bike or walk through the student parking lot between 4-6 p.m.

There, more than 20 student clubs were scheduled to showcase decorated cars and posters, and students and their families were invited to wear costumes and pick up candy.

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