Huamantla Village Festival Opening

Last Saturday night we helped my fiance's mum prepare enough Atoli and buy enough Pan de dulce (sweet bread) to serve to about 500 people after the 6am opening mass of the annual festival of the Huamantla village.  Atoli is a hot drink made of corn flour, water, sugar and vanilla. You can also add other flavours like chocolate or fruit to taste and we added chocolate to ours.

Preparing and serving this food and drink is a family tradition for my fiance's Mum and her family and she has been doing this for more than 50 years when she inherited the responsibility from her Mum. Her brother and sister also honour this tradition by serving hot rice, milk drink which tastes like hot runny rice pudding to drink with Tamales to eat.

Like Atoli, Tamales also have a corn flour base which is made into masa (dough), wrapped with sweet or savoury filling in corn leaves and steamed until cooked. They are very traditional Mexican food that dates back to the Mayas which are filling and very tasty.

After leaving home at 4.00am we arrived at the church by 5.30am in plenty of time to hear Mariachis playing in the church before the opening 6.00am mass.

Flowers are an important part of this Huamantla festival, so the church is decorated beautifully with flowers and outside there is a carpet of flowers, which is like a beautiful mural on the floor of flowers and interesting carrots for the colour orange! Throughout the festival more carpets of flowers will be made outside the church and on one day during the festival carpets of flowers will be made on some of the streets, which will be closed for the purpose.

After mass, we moved to the trucks where we and a few other families served the hundreds of people lining up to enjoy a hot drink and tamale or pan de dulce on the cold morning. 

As we finished serving food and the crowd started to clear, fireworks were let off from the roof of the church. It was an official and organised part of the festival which took me by surprise, as I hadn't expected a church to be used as the launch location for fireworks. However, in hind sight, it would not have been fitting for a Mexican festival to open without fireworks and most festivals involve the church.

Later in the day we visited the main street to see the donkeys. As is the tradition, some people choose to dress their donkeys from hoof to ear in fancy dress. Unless you were told it would be easy to think the donkeys were people dressed up in clothes to look like a donkey because there is so little of the poor little donkey actually visible.

Other enter their donkeys in the street racing. It is incredible to see how small donkeys actually are in relation to their passengers. Also interesting is how the donkeys choose to travel at their own pace regardless of the amount of "encouragement" they are given by their riders or by the helpers who run behind some of the donkeys to provide further "encouragement".

Another feature of the festival is the 'running of the toros (bulls)' - just like they do in Spain. I haven't seen that yet, but I am led to believe it is almost as exciting and dangerous for the crowd as well as the runners.