La Tamalada for Christmas - Sadly, Not This Year
Although I am not Hispanic, my mother grew up in a mining town in Arizona that was probably 75% Hispanic. And her mother grew up in Texas, in an area with a heavy Hispanic population. Although most traditions from Mexico weren't part of my childhood experience, one tradition was. The Christmas Tamalada. Every year, my mother and whoever she could drag into the process made dozens of tamales in an assembly line sort of process. They were the traditional Christmas Eve meal in my household, along with most of the Hispanic households in the town where I grew up, which had about a 40% Hispanic population.
I won't give the recipe for my mother's tamales. They were much like everyone else's. Freshly made masa made with the traditional lard, long-stewed pork, a red chile sauce as a gravy, made with the juices from fat created by the pork and the cooking liquid. The masa was spread on soaked, dried cornhusks, with a generous dollop of shredded braised pork and the red chile gravy. Then, they were rolled up in the cornhusks with ends of the cornhusks folded over. They got refrigerated for a day or two, until Christmas eve, when they were steamed in a large pot and served hot in their cornhusks. Each diner would unwrap however many they thought they could eat and then pour more of that red, spicy gravy over them before digging in.
It was a tradition for many years, until my mother was too old to organize the Tamalada. I got roped into helping make tamales many times, and have done the entire thing myself a few times, as well. Now, I buy my tamales from a restaurant that makes them up in vast numbers for the Christmas season. Not necessarily for Christmas eve, because that's not the tradition in my wife's family, but for other times.
The last time my mother organized a serious Tamalada was in 1991, the year my wife and I were married. Our ceremony was on December 21, and my entire family and my wife's family traveled to the small town I lived in for the ceremony. My mother made 12 dozen tamales and a gallon pickle jar full of the sauce for them and I steamed them for supper the night before the wedding. We all sat down and dug in, and it was a first for her family. all of which flew out to California for the wedding. It wasn't a first wedding for either my wife or me, and we held it in the front yard of my house. But, people in both families still talk about that tamale feast, 28 years later.
My mother and father are both 95 years old this Christmas. Both of them are in poor health and can't do much. I worry that they'll be overwhelmed, which is why I and my wife won't be there for Christmas, but plenty of the rest of the family will be, and we'll be out there later this Winter. If there are tamales, which I doubt, they will be made by someone else.
If you want to learn more about the Tamalada Christmas Tradition, here's a great article from The Smithsonian. It's detailed enough for any decent cook to recreate the process:
https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/tamalada-christmas-tamale-tradition
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thanks.
I must have been drooling thinking about them 
Thank you for sharing them with us. 
