During Christmas we have some familiar routines, like we eat Chex mix until our fingertips are covered in salt, we complain about the condition of the roads, and we go to the cemetary to give sacrifices to the dead.

At the cemetary where all of our relatives are buried there are rows of plots and no upright grave stones. If you looked at it at night it would look like a park, but if you looked at it during the day you would see that some graves have flowers in metal vases that are built into the plot and can be removed and upturned and screwed into the hole they were taken out of. Some graves have wooden crosses. On war-related holidays the veterans get little flags. At Christmas people put luminaries out—tea candles in paper bags weighted with sand, or potted candles in colored glass vases, usually. This is what my family does.

Nobody puts anything on the graves to celebrate Halloween.

We always visit the graves on Christmas Eve. It used to be we would go to the cemetary on our way to my grandmother’s house for Christmas dinner, but yea, in the fullness of time, we were spared that trip. Now it’s a special thing we do, driving out to pay our respects to the dead people we know. It’s a growing list, and year by year our dead friends take up more of the cemetary acreage, and it becomes more and more time-consuming to see after them.

At six feet below ground, the temperature is fairly stable; it gets warmer in the summer, but not as warm as it does above ground. It gets colder in the winter, but not as cold for them as it does for us, standing topside in a bare field next to the open sagebrush, with a little bit of wind coming out of the night. My dad gets on his knees, sticks a match into the bag to try to light the candle. It gets blown out, and we stand for a few minutes awkwardly, acting humbled, and usually I am pointing a flashlight down at him.

Dead people aren’t cold, and they don’t care about presents. We have been going out there every year that I’ve been alive, and now we take my sister’s kids with us. They drove with me in my car this year, and as we rolled slowly along the cemetary road, I told them to be careful, because on Christmas Eve the veil between the living and the dead was especially thin. That’s not what I said, what I actually said was there were liable to be Christmas Zombies tonight, so stay close to the flashlight. This scared them, and I think that’s good, because if they are scared of dead people, they are more likely to get into the spirit of appeasing them with luminary candles.

Christmas in a theological sense is symbolic of the triumph of life over death, even going back to the whole winter solstice thing. It is of thematic importance to set a candle in the middle of the cemetary, walk back to the car, look back it it pressing outwards with light. I want future generations to understand why it’s not actually for the sake of the dead that we go out there every year, it’s for our own anxiety about death. Thus, Christmas Zombies. It’s all about making connections. It’s all about the kids.