Milwaukee's Day of the Dead Parade 2016

The Day of the Dead parade was held in Milwaukee today. It's something we look forward to every year. This year's celebration was especially nice because we had, unbelievably enough, nearly 70 degree weather! So it was a comfortable day to be walking around. We started in a park, waiting for the parade to begin. There was lots of good people watching, as you can imagine! That photo above, which is one of my favorites, is of one of the belly dancers.

Check out her earring:

I'm starting with pics of just the belly dancers.

I haven't seen such pretty, flower-filled hairstyles since Ren Faire!

There was a male gypsy type dude with the ladies.

He had a gold embroidered vest on. Someone with a cool tote walked into this pic, and I like the patterns together. I realized that he had an elephant on his vest, but I just noticed there's an elephant on the tote too.

At the front of the parade were these two:

One is what I interpreted as a ghost bride.

So pretty! I like the sequins in her veil.

The other? I'm not sure, but she looked cool. I think I had the same flowers on my witch hat this year as she had on her headdress and staff!

There were so many colorful skeletons out for the parade, many of them were cute child skeletons.

I didn't even notice this guy in the background at the time. It's fun to get photos home and look at the details, and there are plenty of details in these!

The skeleton mask in the front is a design I haven't seen before. It looks like maybe cut paper or lace? I like how delicate it is. At first I thought the face was painted on.

Love this kid's expression:

A couple of those cool floral up do's:

Some Aztec dancers were performing when we arrived at the park, but there was such a big crowd around them that we couldn't see what was going on. This little dancer is the only one I saw after the show. Cute little skeleton leggings.

These are pics I took while we were standing around waiting for the parade to begin.

There were some tents with artists selling their work.

I think I might be seeing more of the same flowers as the ones on my witch hat here.

There were a few decorated frames you could take your picture with. A man walked up and nicely offered to take one of us.

This guy was walking around saging the area. A few people were. There were so many smells and different sources of smoke going. I think I still smell faintly of it. It smells good as smoke goes.

On the way back to the car, we ran into the parade coming back to the park.

A signaling skeleton bicyclist.

Passing a house near where we were parked, we saw some hanging Halloween decorations.

I haven't seen these before.

Back in the car, we passed this Halloween costume inspiration on a billboard:

For some reason, it took me a while to get the joke. Some time later I blurted out "Oh, like a cheese wedge!" OK. Haha. Think this will be the hot costume for 2016? Probably not in our climate, unless this guy plans to wear a coat over that. Although, we are having that unseasonably warm weather...

I'm going to end this post by sharing a cute animation I found, "Night of the Day of the Dead"

Pretty good animation! It reminds me of some skeleton puppets I've seen.