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Feast Day By Sarah Baird Growing up as an only child, my status as sole offspring led me into a preoccupation with stories about what it’s like to be raised in a huge, too-many-siblings-to-count families: The Sound of Music with the seven Von Trapp children singing and dancing their way through the days; The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew , which chronicles the ways in which four sister and an elder brother work to care for one another and their widowed mother; and around Christmas time, I would always light up at the thought of rereading my favorite picture book celebrating the raucous, mischievous, more love-to-go-around nature of cousins in Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto.

T oo Many Tamales is about cousins, yes, but it’s also about — you guessed it — tamales: specifically, the Mexican American tradition of gathering extended family around the table each Christmas Eve to assemble an enormous batch of tamales for dozens of aunts, uncles and everyone in-between to enjoy. While each family has their own steeped-in-tradition means of crafting tamales (particularly the filling, which can range from spiced ground beef to a melange of vegetables), Soto’s narration takes a classic, step-by-step approach to explaining classic tamale preparations: splaying out the corn husks, spreading them with masa (corn dough), adding filling, and then steaming them over the stove in batches. The twist? Our young tamale-making hero, Maria, decides to play with her mother’s diamond ring while kneading the masa, and when she can’t find the piece of jewelry after the tamales drop to cook, worries that she’s left it inside a tamale, resulting in the

inspired (if a little rascally) choice to force her cousins to eat through all 24 tamales in an attempt to find the ring. (Spoiler alert: The ring was fine, and the family gladly worked together to make 24 more tamales — a true win-win.) The book captures not only a sense of gathering and commitment to tradition through cooking, but the ways in which the process of creation and ceremony build a bridge between past, present, and future. Another tradition that remains central to linking future generations to the rituals of home for Mexican Americans is the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, celebrated each Dec. 12. The Patron Saint of the Americas, Our Lady of Guadalupe (sometimes simply called “Our Lady”) refers to the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, with her annual feast day marking the moment when she revealed herself through an apparition in present-day Mexico that led to Christi anity becoming widely embraced across the country. “December 12, 1531, was when the appari tion of Our Lady of Guadalupe happened for [recently converted Catholic] Juan Diego during a time when the Franciscan mission aries in Mexico were having a lot of trouble evangelizing to the Indigenous people. The Indigenous cultures there were in the middle of a depression, because their hopes were failing, and in their minds, they were thinking that it was almost the end of the world: something big is going to happen about this time . But even during this depression, when [Our Lady] expressed herself in the appari tion, they recognized her because all the

symbols that are in her image represent that she brings the truly living God to them,” explains Angélica Malmberg, Administra tive Assistant for the Hispanic Ministry at the Diocese of Lafayette. The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe had appeared several times before to Juan Diego (who was Indigenous) in previous visions, but on Dec. 12, the apparition of Our Lady he witnessed was so filled with rich, identifiable symbolism it moved the hearts of a population toward conversion. Malmberg notes that conversions to Christianity were so widespread across what is now Mexico in the wake of Our Lady’s apparition that it’s said 300,000 people were once baptized in a single day. “All the elements of the apparition were symbolic to the [Indigenous people] in the sense that they could understand what she meant with her clothes and the gestures. There’s a kind of radiance behind her, like the sun, which for the Indigenous community was God, yet this image was saying to them, ‘This woman is not God, but God is behind her.’ Her hands appear to be in what we call prayer, but for the Indigenous, that position of the hands means offering. And what was she offering? Well, she was offering her son. And how do they know that? Because she was wearing a sash on her waist which was an indication for the Indigenous that this a pregnant woman,” says Deacon Juan Pagán, Coordinator for Hispanic Ministry in the Diocese of Lafayette. “She appears to be a mixture of both Spaniard and Indigenous — kind of like what we say here, Creole, a mixture of races — so it’s another way of

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