Below is an answer to my school teacher friend who sent me a picture from Oaxaca for his Christmas holiday...
Andy, thanks for the photo. Hope you are in Oaxaca and not just surfing like me. Below is what I am currantly writing for my journal...
Since I am always broke, I try to figure out something fun to do, hence the tamale dinner and a little party. This little feast was part of a remembrance of one of the best Christmas season I ever had.
The setting was Calle de Rayon, Guadalajara, 1951. The street we lived on had a block party for Christmas. Many of the neighbors made food to sell and some to just serve, while the men and older boys strung up many pinatas over the street. It started in early evening. There were portable record players and radios for music. There were a few guitars out with guys singing badly. People were just singing together various songs I didn't understand. The adults were drinking like fish and the kids were running wild, going from little table to little table to sample food and drink, mostly fruit punches of various sorts, and some homemade cookies and candies. Things got going after a couple of hours, ganging around one pinata after another pushing each other back and forth to get picked. Oh, and the fireworks, fire crackers in strings, or just tossed one by one, rockets going up into the deep purple black night with brillant twinkling stars. Back then there was no polution, the city is relatively high altitude, so you could see lots of stars.
Most of the fall seemed like one weird holiday after another, but nothing like that one. Dolores downstairs tried to explain some of them, but I couldn't follow because I didn't know the stories that went with them. Sometimes on car trips out of the city, we would be on roads with long lines of pilgrams going somewhere. Where are they going, what are they doing...? Questions never answered.
Looking some of them up, just now, no wonder. Most are wrapped up with christian, pagan, and political legends intertwined with native and colonial cultures. It seemed like starting with Independence Day and Hidalgo--a figure I could not understand---then Day of the Dead which I was beginning to understand---and Guadalupe another mystery---there was a building up of festivals leading to Christmas, which wasn't over until sometime in the middle of January, when they started all over on other themes leading up to Easter... It seemed mighty convienent that festivals, holidays, and other outdoor fare, dropped during the rainy season from June or July to September. During then, we took lots of car trips with neighbors to the hot springs and resorts with drinking and dancing clubs of no special significance. The list of dances to learn seemed as long as the religious-pagan holiday lists.
It was a year of the most intense raw beauty and fear I ever had. Andre Brenton was right, surrealism was Mexico back then. Like what, eating too many peanuts during a bull fight and puking in the stadium toilets. My stepfather thought it was the killing. I always insisted it was too many peanuts---even fifty years later. The steen of dark blood on a black hide, punctured with brillant colored ribbons bobbing up and down as the bull trotted forward for another round. The ribbon sticks were the work of the banderilleros. I thought the picadores where cheating with their long lances hitting the back muscles and sometimes the lungs. This was long before anybody worried about whatever we now worry about. The tinny band in the stadium covered center announced each act, so that I sort of understood what a play was, before I knew what a play was. Plays end in death, which was the graphic before me. And I mediated long and hard over Sketches of Spain which is the jazz rendition much later. Goya etchings on the subject
Merry Christmas, Chuck