About a month ago, I was lucky enough to spend one of the nights of the day of the dead in a small village in Xochimilco, on the southern outskirts of Mexico City. I stayed with a traditional Nahua family and watched as they made blue corn tamales (I had never seen blue corn tamales before, and neither had any of my other Mexican friends) and sat around and laughed together. In the other room a table was laden with apples and mandarins and liter bottles of soda and dozens of little sugar skulls and pan de muertos, which is a sugared bread baked to have the shape of a crossbones on the top. The dead were visiting, they told me, but of course the living couldnât see them. At the end of the two nights the food would be tasteless and bland, which meant that the dead had come and eaten the flavor. That night, Isabel, one of the granddaughters of my host, took me and my friend up to the graveyard where some neighbors were keeping vigil. We talked about a lot of things, but she was particularly interested in Taylor Swift.Â
"You know who she is?" she asked, almost reverently. I admitted that I did, but that I couldnât place one of her songs. She was rapturous.Â
"No one here knows her, but I love her. Sheâs the best." She asked me if I knew any Mexican musicians, and I said l liked Lila Downs.Â
"Whoâs she?" she asked, and my friend and I just laughed. Where the culture gap meets the generation gap, I guess.Â
We kept talking about the USâ was it prettier there than here? Watching the flickering glow of candlelight among the flower-laden graves, which ranged from small hand-lettered crosses to tiny brick houses, and beyond that, the sea of lights of the city below us, I could only manage an emphatic negation. No, the most beautiful things Iâve seen in my life, Iâve seen in Mexico.Â
What about US traditions? Do we have day of the dead? I told her about the Halloween parade in New Yorkâs West Village. Then I told them about my familyâs Thanksgiving, which they seemed to find fascinating and strange. Of course they had heard about Thanksgiving, but not about sweet potato pies and dancing to James Brown in the kitchenâand definitely not about black Friday. âDoes your mother make tamales?â Isabel asked me. As I had at that point eaten about six of them (pineapple, peppers with cheese, green salsa), I honestly wished she could.Â
When we got to Christmas, however, I was completely astonished. âHere,â my friend told me, âChristmas lasts for a month. It starts with the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, then the posadas and goes until the day of the kings.âÂ
I could vaguely place the Virgin of Guadalupe and the day of the kings, but I had never heard of posadas, which previously Iâd only thought was another word for bed and breakfast. âThen the what?â
"The posadas are like the calaveras," Isabel told me, referring to the groups of kids who came by every few minutes to sing a prayer in front of the offering and then receive their fruit and tamales (and sometimes candy). "You go to houses and sing and then they let you in."
"For nine days," my friend added.
"You have Christmas caroling for nine days?" I asked.
"Whatâs Christmas caroling?" they asked, and I tried to explain.
"Sure," my friend said. "But in this case the people outside sing because they represent the Virgin and Joseph looking for a place to stay right before Jesus was born, and the people inside sing to refuse them, and then eventually they give in."
Later, when I got back home, I asked another friend about the posadas. She told me that they represented the 9 months of the Virgin Maryâs pregnancy.Â
"Wait, wait," I said, "they celebrate Christâs gestation?â
She nodded. âAnd I think it might have something to do with an Aztec festival, too.â
So I looked this up. Apparently, the festival of Panquetzaliztli, which celebrated the Mexica sun and war god, Huitzilopochtli, took place around the same time of year, and was one of the most important in the Mexica calendar. I couldnât discover if it involved walking around to peopleâs doors and singing, but the posadas are clearly a centuries-old Mexican tradition. Weâre about six days away from the first day of the posadas, and I canât wait to drink my Mexican punch (which is warm and sweetened with pure sugarcane and fruit) to see it.Â