SAN DIEGO – Families marked Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, with festivities and a remembrance ceremony at Greenwood Memorial Park Sunday.

Families gathered around loved ones’ gravestones, decorating the sites and spending time with each other.

“We were always a very close family,” said Jesus Briseno, who came out to spend the day with his family. “Whether it was birthdays, Christmas, New Years, we always make sure to hang out with our grandparents.”

Briseno told FOX 5 his grandmother died on the Sunday of Halloween four years ago. Now his family has a tradition of visiting his grandmother and grandfather’s grave site on the Sunday before Halloween.

“Hopefully they’ve been watching me grow up,” Briseno said. “I’m about to graduate high school and it really makes me feel like I want to make sure that they see me grow up and that they see us, that we’re still together as a family. That we’ll still come to visit them regardless of where we’re at. We’re still gonna get together.”

In another part of the park, Rosa Mireles decorated around the gravestones of her grandparents and her mother.

“I really never knew what this really meant until we lost our grandparents and my mom, because she made it a very special time for everybody,” Mireles said.

Mireles said she’s now determined to make sure her children and grandchildren keep the tradition alive.