When I was doing research for my book, “Food from my Heart,” I uncharacteristically made a trip to Oaxaca in the winter. On every visit to this magical place that is my spiritual home, my first stop is the Benito Juarez market and a stall that sells all types of holiday decorations.

Doña Juana, the owner, was flanked by rows of Baby Jesus’ of all sizes—from six inches to about 2 feet tall—all dressed in luxurious outfits in royal blue or papal red velvets, satins, lace, taffeta, golden crowns. Hanging above were bunches of miniature gold huaraches (sandals), tiny scepters, and cloth flowers marked “Made in China.”

It was just before February 2, Día de la Candelaria or Candlemas Day. Candlemas celebrates the presentation of Christ at the temple by Joseph and Mary, as described in the Gospel of St. Luke. On that day, the child was acclaimed by Simeon as God’s true light. So this is the day when people bring candles to the church to be blessed.

Everyone in the shop was busy making more outfits while Dona Juana consulted with a young couple holding a small unclothed Baby Jesus. I was shocked when she told them that it will be 50,000 pesos to dress him (back then about $20), which seemed exorbitant to me. She explained that the couple had gotten a madrina—literally a godmother but in actuality a more well-to-do friend—who wanted them to be able to participate in the ceremony and offered to pick up the tab.

When I went to the church on February 2, it was filled to capacity and smelled intensely of incense and candle wax. The aroma of wood smoke from hearths stuck to everyone’s clothes. There were young and old couples, some wearing native dress of reds and shocking pinks, others in modern clothing and jewelry, widows all in black and men in working clothes. Most of the people carried a royally-dressed Baby Jesus while others carried candles to be blessed and used in times of need.

I remember this part from my childhood, when we’d light a candle for rain, good grades, lost earrings, safe trips or even to make a boyfriend call. But the elaborately-dressed figures were new to me. Each family was keeping a Baby Jesus on the home altar.

Several years ago, I went to a store in Brooklyn in January and was amazed to see stacks of clothes for the Baby Jesus on sale for the celebration. So a few days ago, I went to Sunset Park in Brooklyn to investigate if the tradition still lives on in this country. The first store where I stopped, on 5th Avenue and 42 Street, had a whole window full of Baby Jesus’ dressed to the nines and sitting in gold chairs. I inquired how much it cost to get a medium-sized statue. The grand total, including gold chair, crown and sandals, satin dress and maybe a cape, was $139. They claimed to be doing brisk business.

Holidays are one way to stimulate the economy, both here and there.

Rodica Prato www.rodicaprato.com

Curiously of all the items I posted in the last year, this piece on El Pedimento, got the most hits .  I imagine that its popularity is rooted in magic or wishful thinking.  It would be wonderful if our wishes became our realities though there’s that famous line “More tears have been shed for prayers that have been answered than those that have gone unanswered.”

I asked my dear friend and brilliant illustrator  Rodica Prato (www.rodicaprato.com)  to please do one depicting her son’s hopes for the coming year but she chose to do one for me.  Why don ‘t you make one  and post it or email me a picture and I and I will post it.  I’ve talked it over with friends and family   and they say that they want to have the option of either giving thanks for blessings received this year or to ask for something for the coming year.

Every time, I’m going to write about a a long-standing tradition, I call my friend, muse  and star of my book The Food and Life of Oaxaca (Macmillan 1997) Zoila Mendoza in Teotitlán del Valle, with trepidation to verify that it is still in existence.

We spoke at length about the tradition which it is not limited to New Years’ Eve . More and more  people come every year to bring offerings of appreciation for wishes granted and petitions for help  that a special chapel has been built a few minutes away from the church but near to La Cruz de los Pedimentos which stands outside Mitla (The Town of Souls in Zapotec) near the town of Juquila.

On New Year’ Eve they light candles, lay flowers and kiss and pray to the cross.  They burn copal incense and blow it to form the shape of the sign of the cross. They plan to spend the night there laying out their pedimento, a miniature representation of what they hope to get in the coming year.  Zoila said that this year the pedimentos will be very elaborate as the last few years have been very tough on Oaxacans though the unrest has settled and tourists are coming back.

People believe so strongly that there wishes will be granted that they make everything as realistic as possible so there is no confusion.  There will be houses made of sticks and clay, horses and other animals inside a corral, corn and maguey fields with furrows, as in the illustration above from Frances Toor’s  A Treasury of Mexican Folkways, originally published by Bonanza Books in 1947 and reissued in 1985.  It’s remarkable that so many of the traditions she wrote about are still thriving.

Many outsiders join in the celebration.  What would you ask for and how would you depict it?

In other parts of Mexico, there might be a New Year’s Eve dinner followed by dancing but most people will interrupt the celebration to go to midnight Mass to welcome the  new year.  Then it’s on to eat the traditional menudo (tripe soup) to prevent a hangover or just for the pleasure of it.

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I think if I could choose one event to dramatize the spirit of Mexican religion, it would be the Day of the Dead, or actually Days —  Los Dias de los Muertos, November l and 2. To begin with, I assure you that this name does not sound in the least ghoulish or morbid to a Mexican. The Day of the Dead is perhaps our happiest, most life-affirming holiday. It is the celebration of memory, the time when we really feel we are speaking to and embracing those whom we have lost.

For me the Day of the Dead has been an important moment of the year since before I can remember. But even so I don’t think I took in the full dimension of meaning until I was a nineteen-year-old college student travelling — in an unchaperoned group of young people for the first time in my life! — to visit the ceremony on an island in Lake Patzcuaro, in the state of Michoacan. It was a time in the late sixties where educated Mexicans from all over were suddenly “discovering” the richness of Mexican culture and descending in droves on previously untouched spots. So were many European tourists.  So I have to say that the Day of the Dead celebration on the island of Janitzio, probably the most famous in all Mexico, already had a strong note of commercialism. But for me it was an aastonishing and very moving pageant dedicated to the continuity of life.

We set out at dusk by motorboat, singing “Maria Isabel” to the strains of two guitars and one set of bongos and full of the famous local pescado blanco (white fish) caught in graceful “butterfly nets.” The lake was soon a vast, chilly sea of darkness lit only by a few guide lanterns on canoes making the same journey.  But even from far off we saw a yellow-white glow coming from the cemetery. We disembarked into a crowd of visitors and vendors that I couldn’t match with anything in our sedate, private family celebration of the day. What a maelstrom!  People were selling toys in the shape of laughing skulls, candies made like skeletons, chicle gums in all colors, black, yellow, or white candles, candleholders of shiny black pottery, copal (incense) burners. Streams of cheerful family parties pushed past us in the dark and confusion as if en route to a midnight picnic — which isn’t too far off the mark.

Janitzio is a rocky island, and the hilly cemetery might have been hard to navigate had it not been so full of lights. It was a carnival lit by thousands of candles. Hundreds of brilliant orange-yellow shapes — high arches or criscrossed squares — glowed in the darkness above every gravesite. They were cempasuchil, yellow marigolds, strung on ropes or strings, sometimes spelling out names. I had never seen or dreamed of such a fantasy of cempasuchil. Huddled in shawls and rebozos against the chilly evening, the people settled down to sing and drink and chat on the ground by the graves, half-shadowed revellers watched from the darker shadows by crowds of German or Dutch tourists. They were Tarascan Indians, and for them the strings of flowers were arches framing a passage for the souls of their friends or relatives to return to their earthly resting place on a kind of social visit. This is the whole purpose of the celebration.

Yes, these people were having a nice reunion with their loved ones! They had brought food for the purpose, including the favorite dishes of the deceased, and placed them — always in new pottery vessels bought for the occasion — before small altars erected at each grave with a picture of the loved one. They had also taken along any comforts the person might be missing in the next life, such as bottles of liquor and packs of cigarettes, toys and games and new clothes. I was astonished at the practical range of ofrendas (offerings) laid on freshly ironed white embroidered tea towels. Of course we had always visited the family graves on the Day of the Dead, but our celebration had been limited to scrubbing the tombstones and decorating them with zinnias or other autumn flowers and sharing a silent moment of communion.

The full-blown Day of the Dead ceremony, which I was seeing that evening for the first time, is most common in Mexico among the Indian peoples and the more rural mestizos. Four hundred years ago it probably would not have seemed strange in most places. At that time many peoples in Mexico celebrated a festival in August and September to ask the intervention of departed ones in warding off early frost. The idea that individual personalities continue after death and can intercede for the living with the great powers fitted well enough with the Spanish Catholic faith to survive the Conquest without much change. The holiday conveniently migrated through the calendar to coincide with the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls Days at the beginning of November. But only the date changed. Nothing disturbed the original basis of the celebration, the belief that dead souls spend a brief period each year on earth on a kind of holiday. It’s an opportunity to catch up on those who are dear to you.

The Janitzio celebration begins after dark on November l and continues as a graveside vigil until dawn. In other villages there are usually two celebrations. November l, All Saints, is when the souls of the children arrive home in the villages and are met by welcoming committees of the local mayor and dignitaries along with the town band. The procession leads the children through an arch of cempasuchil at the gate of the cemetery  and helps them find their graves. Each grave is decorated with images or structures of cempasuchil and turned into party sites with candies, toys, new clothing, and white candles, always in new pottery candleholders. On the next day, All Souls, the souls of the adults are welcomed in the same way (except that the candles are black or yellow). Those without surviving relatives are not forgotten — their graves are decorated by townspeople. In some communities the altar with the ofrendas is set up at home instead of in the cemetery.

Cempasuchil, the flower of the dead and a small replica of an ofrenda.

Beyond the favorite foods of the deceased, certain things are traditional for the Days of the Dead that date back to pre-Columbian times, including a sweet pumpkin dessert called calabaza en tacha and some form of tamales. In Janitzio people had brought a special kind of tamales with duck filling, from the Lake Patzcuaro wild ducks that are supposed to be not shot but harpooned for this occasion. But  the most famous specialty of the day throughout Mexico is of European origin. In one of those typical Indian-Spanish intermarriages that have shaped our culture, the native peoples came to celebrate the Days of the Dead with a rich, sweet yeast bread on the model of the altar breads that are special feast-day offerings everywhere in Europe from Spain to Sweden. The Mexican imagination put a new spin of fantasy on the idea by shaping the loaves into different images. The famous pan de muerto  (bread of death) comes in the shape of human figures, alligators, lizards, and other animals — but most often skulls and crossbones or teardrops and crosses, gaily decorated with colored sugar crystals. In many places, people bring the local mole and in Oaxaca tamales de amarillo are de riguer.

The most popular places for tourists to experience this magical holiday are Janitzio, Michoacan and Oaxaca (which has become quite touristy) and places around Mexico City but I personally will be going to a less known destination: Naolinco, Veracruz. You like the tradition but can’t travel just now? make your own. I’ll put up instructions and examples in the next two days . I am making the altar for Aytun Altindal, who was the love of my life, twenty years ago but with whom I remained very close until he passed away last year.

This is my official day of the Dead press release so it may seem familiar to you!