Nine days of Las Posadas: Mexican Christmas Customs
Tara A. Spears
In Mexico, the holiday season begins with the bang of fireworks in honor of the Virgin on December 16 and picks up momentum with the celebration of Las Posadas beginning that day and continuing until Christmas Eve. The Posada days celebrate the part of the Christmas story where Joseph and Mary looked for a room at an inn but were turned away.
Traditionally, children re-enact the ‘Posada’ procession with the families gathering afterwards for fiestas. For the Posadas, the outside of houses are decorated with seasonal greens and paper lanterns or colored lights. Inside the homes, the usual holiday decoration is the nativity scene, El Nacimiento, although in the last five years decorated pine trees have begun to be added.
The focal point in a Mexican home is a stable where clay, wood, straw, or plaster figurines of the Holy Family are sheltered. The scene may be further populated by an angel, Los Reyes Magos (the Magi), the ox and the ass, shepherds and their flocks, and assorted other people and livestock. The figures may be simply positioned in a bed of heno (Spanish moss), or scattered throughout an elaborate landscape.
Many Mexican families take creating the nativity scene very seriously: it may occupy an entire room, often near the front of the house for convenient viewing by neighbours and passer-by. The home nativity arrangement is a source of family pride and religious belief. The creation of the basic landscape begins with papel roca (paper painted in earth tones) draped over tables, taped onto boxes, crushed and shaped to form a multi-leveled, natural looking terrain that frequently includes a series of hills, and all sorts of clever recreation of a natural items such as ponds, cacti, palm trees, and little houses set to form an entire village scene. Colored sawdust and a variety of natural mosses may be spread out as ground cover before the addition of strings of Christmas lights and the assorted human and animal figures. The scene will not be completed until Christmas Eve when the newborn Baby Jesus is finally laid in the manger bed.
Today, a decorated Christmas tree may be incorporated in the Nacimiento or set up elsewhere in the home. As purchase of a natural pine represents a luxury to most Mexican families, the typical arbolito (little tree) is often an artificial one, or more commonly, a bare branch cut from a copal tree or some other type of shrub collected from the countryside. It is traditional to decorate with paper hand-made flowers but with commercialism infiltrating the Mexican culture, store bought ornaments and mini lights are now appearing in homes.
Until very recently, Santa Claus and reindeer did not generally figure in the scheme of Navidad in this predominately tropical country. Although the shopping malls have visits with Santa, a Mexican youngster’s holiday wish list is directed instead to el Niño Dios, the Holy Child.
From the simplest paper decorations to elaborate family keepsakes, the holiday season in Mexico is focused on the spiritual meaning of Christmas and family activities. Get into the Christmas spirit by joining you neighbours carolling!
