Monday morning saw the Wareham Middle School’s auditorium brightly festooned with crepe paper flowers, student pottery work, and colorful sugar skull ceramics, in honor of the Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead.

The school celebrated the holiday with a day-long art show, supervised by art teacher Andrea Barrett. Barrett said the holiday is aimed at celebrating the lives of the dead, not their deaths.

“The word ‘dead’, in Spanish – it doesn’t really have the same heavy and negative connotations in Spanish as it does in English,” Barrett said. “Day of the Dead is like a celebration of the life the person had. I tell the kids, ‘You’re allowed to be sad 364 days of the year about it, but this is the day you are happy they lived.’”

The holiday is a three-day event, which begins on Oct. 31, and ends on Nov. 2. Oct. 31 is the day of preparation, and Nov. 1 celebrates the lives of children who have died. The final day, Nov. 2, celebrates the lives of adults who have passed on.

Barrett said she lived in Mexico for three years. Though she came back to the United States to be closer to her family, she missed the brightness of the country, and decided to bring her experience to Wareham. Though she has done a unit on Day of the Dead every year, the art show is new for her. She came up with the idea, while she was eating lunch with the High School Spanish teacher, Amanda Zac.

“We just came to the conclusion: why don’t we just put it all together in the auditorium?” Barrett said. “There’s a ton of artwork in there – 260 kids have art, and each kids has at least two pieces. Some kids might have three or four.”

Among the artwork displayed were small altars to remember the deceased.

“They put the person’s favorite food, and drink, and flowers [on the altar],” Barrett said. “Flowers symbolize life, and that’s why they put them on the eyes [of the sugar skulls].”

The students picked Robin Williams and Whitney Houston to remember with physical altars in the auditorium, but also created “modern” altars in the form of Facebook pages.

“Someone in the eighth grade made one for a student here who passed a couple years ago,” Barrett said. “But a lot of them are famous people, because they don’t know many people who died.”

Barrett said the students were having a great time leading classes and faculty around the exhibition.

“I have kids falling all over each other to be the leaders,” Barrett said. “I am so impressed with my students today … and how much pride they are taking in their artwork.”