Cinco de Mayo: Ole!

Today is Cinco de Mayo so I thought I'd give a shout out to one of my favorite places to visit (Mexico!) and one of my favorite foods (Mexican!). Certainly with the whole flu thing going on (maybe you've heard of it?) Mexico needs all the moral support it can get.

First off, what is Cinco de Mayo? This is something I often wondered about when the holiday suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere back in the mid-90s. Is it like a Mexican St. Patrick's Day? Mexico's Independence Day? A holiday made up by tequila and beer companies to sell more product? I suspect some of you are vaguely familiar with the holiday's background: that it celebrates Mexico's defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. But this begs the question (or at least it does for me), what the hell were the French doing in Mexico in the first place?

According to Wikipedia (W, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...) they were there to collect on a debt owed by the previous Mexican government. And May 5 is a big deal historically because a) the Mexicans, although outnumbered two-to-one by the French troops, managed to defeat a much better-equipped army that b) had known no defeat for 50 years and c) because it was the last time an army from another continent invaded the Americas. Vedddy interesting.

Also interesting, Cinco de Mayo is not widely celebrated in Mexico (it's not even considered a federal holiday) but it is--and has been--celebrated in California since the 1860s. I suspect this is because California was, at that time, still largely occupied by families of Mexican descent who remained loyal to their country of origin.

Now let's switch gears. When I was a little girl, before we moved to Georgia, my birthday parties always included a pinata. Pinatas are the bomb. Think about it--what other birthday game allows you to whack the shit out of a paper mache object suspended above your head while blindfolded, only to eventually yield a bounty of candy and toys? Nothing beats the sight of tons of kids scrambling on the ground to grab as much cheap, sugary crap as possible.

So the pinata. For the first time ever...Wikipedia failed me on this one. I had to do some actual digging to see what I could find out. I found a neat history here...but will briefly summarize for those of you who can't be bothered to click the link.

First off, there are some folks who suspect pinatas originated in China. Apparently, per Marco Polo (who I'm frankly a bit dubious of), the Chinese would, during the New Year, create figures with colored paper and stuff them with seeds. The custom then passed to Italy in the 14th century where the Italians would fashion pignatta or "fragile pots" out of clay and use them to carry water during Lent. Then this passed to Spain where the pot was decorated with ribbons, colored paper, and tinsel. When the custom was brought to Central America, it merged with a similar Aztec tradition in which the priests honored the birthday of their war god by decorating a clay pot, stuffing it with little treasures, hanging it from a pole, and letting blindfolded folks hit it with a stick until it broke.

PS for some really cool (and to some degree, disturbing) looking pinatas take a look here, here, and here.