There's a Plastic Baby Jesus in My Cake!

If you’re fortunate enough to be enveloped by the warmth of family and friends in Mexico during the Christmas season you may be lucky enough to find a baby Jesus hidden in your dessert as you celebrate the Twelfth Night, or Dia de Reyes, (Three Kings Day) on January 6^th.

If you love fruit cake or panettone you’ll love Rosca de Reyes (wreath of the kings), a sweet bread with candied fruits that celebrates the arrival of the Magi. The tradition in Mexico is that whoever finds the baby Jesus in their slice of confection is blessed, and is bestowed the honor of preparing tamales and hosting the celebration of Candlemas on February 2nd.

Sometimes you’ll find multiple baby Jesus’ in the Rosca de Reyes because making tamales is a marathon effort that often involves all of the women in a community. Each woman brings one of the ingredients and each person is responsible for a portion of the production; preparing the masa harina,  cleaning and sorting the corn husks, making the dough, preparing the ingredients, making the sauces , filling the tamales, carefully tying them, steaming the tamales. This is an all day affair that often extends into the evening with all the women in the group gathered in a kitchen, ranchero music playing in the background, and children underfoot. So regardless of your esteem for Punxatawnee Phil, you’ll be too busy making tamales that day to pay much attention to whether the groundhog sees his shadow. But I'm getting ahead of myself, more on Candlemas later.

Three Kings Day is also the day when gifts are brought, not by Santa, but by the Three Kings. Children put their shoes outside their door along with a handful of straw (for the camels and the occasional elephant) and during the night gifts are placed in their shoes. Traditionally these were small hand-wrought toys fashioned from clay or painted sticks, but today of course includes cell phones and upgrades to your favorite electronic device.

This is the feast of the Epiphany as it’s known in much of the world and it brings a celebration of many things. In the Western Christian religion it celebrates the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, the revelation of God incarnate as Jesus Christ, and in some Eastern denominations the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, and in those communities not so strictly bound by religious edict, it's time to box up the Christmas lights and cart the Christmas tree to the local landfill.

In Mexico these celebrations are all intricately woven into the pattern of life. Each celebration is intertwined with the previous one as well as the next throughout the year. Deeply held traditions connect past and future passing these wonderful ceremonies from one generation to the next.