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Mexico is a country located in southern North America. It is between the USA and Central America. The population of Mexico (126.7 million) speak Spanish and are usually of a darker complexion. Mexico is widely recognized for its unique culture and cuisine. Because of its beautiful history and scenery, many people from around the world choose to visit.

Before the country of Mexico, the land was inhabited by Aztecs, a civilization known for its agriculture and architecture. The Aztec civilization was around from 1325 to 1521. It was conquered by Spain in the 16th century. As a result of this, most people in Mexico today speaks Spanish. Before the Aztecs, were the Mayans. The Mayan civilization is theorized to have began between 7000 and 2000 B.C. Similar to the Aztec civilization, it also collapsed in the 1500s.

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Mexico celebrates many shared holidays and some that are nationally exclusive. Although Mexico's shared holidays may seem like the same holiday recycled, there are still many striking differences between how Mexico celebrates its holidays. A very popular holiday in Mexico is Day of the Dead. This holiday focuses on honoring deceased loved ones and helping spirits move on. Those who celebrate this holiday believe that the spirits of those who have passed are still with us. Day of the Dead takes place over the span of three days, from October 31st to November 2nd. During these few days, different traditions are practiced on each day. Food is cooked, altars and offerings are set up, and parades are held. It is common to dress up in costumes and face paint during these parades.

Christmas and Easter are also celebrated in Mexico, however they include different traditions. Christmas was first celebrated in Mexico when Colonists from Spain arrived in Mexico and shared their commonly celebrated Catholic holidays. Another part of Christmas tradition in Mexico is a festival dedicated to the Journey that Joseph and Mary took in the Bible to birth Jesus. This festival takes place between December 16th and December 24th. Typically people attending the festival wear clothes meant to represent angels and Mary and Joseph. On Christmas Eve (Nochebuena), a midnight mass and dinner is held and fireworks light up the night. On Dia de Reyes, kids will receive gifts and they are not usually from Santa Claus because he is not popular there. To end the Christmas celebrations, people take their crucifixes to the church to receive a blessing, then they attend a large feast.

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National Geographic

Aztec Civilization education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/aztec-civilization/

10/19/2023

GVI

How Christmas is celebrated in Mexico

www.gviusa.com/blog/how-christmas-is-celebrated-in-mexico

9/19/2022

Britannica

Las Posadas

www.britannica.com/topic/Las-Posadas

1/15/2023

Britannica

Mexico: holidays and festivals

www.britannica.com/place/Mexico/Holidays-and-festivals

English to Spanish Raleigh

How does Mexico celebrate Thanksgiving?

www.englishtospanishraleigh.com/blog/how-does-mexico-celebrate-thanksgiving

Villa la Estancia

Gratitude Across Borders: Unveiling Mexican Thanksgiving Traditions

rivieranayarit.villalaestancia.com/blog/lifestyle/does-mexico-celebrate-thanksgiving

11/23/2023

Mattito's

Typical Foods Served During the Christmas Season in Mexico

mattitos.com/blog/typical-foods-served-during-the-christmas-season-in-mexico/

2/5/2019

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The evidence of a long-forgotten civilization was everywhere: Beneath a Spanish convent. Underneath a street. Most of it was covered in vines and vegetation, reclaimed by the jungle. But as a pair of British-American explorers combed through the Yucatan Peninsula in the 1830s and 1840s, they soon became convinced the mysterious sites were major archaeological treasures.

Discarded and abandoned, the function of these sites and artifacts-temples, pyramids, remnants of art and even writing-was mostly unknown. Nonetheless, wrote John Lloyd Stephens in 1841, they all seemed to be the work of the same group of people.

"Who these races were, whence they came, or who were their progenitors, I did not undertake to say, nor did I know," he conceded.

The ruins in question were the remnants of the Maya, a towering Mesoamerican civilization that had once covered much of Central America, from northern Belize through Guatemala and southern Mexico. Much more is now known about the group responsible for some of the greatest feats of its kind: Maya people cultivated the region's first crops and domesticated its wildlife, built its first cities, and either created or refined almost every aspect of modern civilization. (Subscriber exclusive: In search of the lost empire of the Maya.)

Though their descendants have preserved some of their culture's traditions and lore, much about the Maya remains as mysterious today as it did centuries ago when their secrets were still hiding in plain sight.

Origins of the Maya

While the origins of Maya culture remain murky, it's thought to have first emerged between 7000 B.C. and 2000 B.C., when hunter-gatherers abandoned their nomadic habits and created more permanent settlements. Recent analyses suggest that those first settlers came from South America and likely developed their staple food, maize, by 4000 B.C. Maize cultivation dramatically changed the Maya's trajectory, literally fueling the explosion of their society and culture.

These newcomers didn't just plant corn: They also learned to prepare it for human consumption with nixtamalization, a process in which dried maize is soaked, then cooked in an alkaline solution that softens corn and renders it more digestible. The Maya would go on to cultivate other important vegetables like squash, cassava, and beans.

The Maya seem to have developed alongside, and traded ideas with, the neighboring Olmec civilization, which some consider one of the most influential societies of ancient times. Researchers believe this is when the Maya adopted the ritual complexes for which they would become famous. Like the Olmec, the Maya soon focused on building cities around their ritual areas. These advancements in agriculture and urban development are now known as the Maya's Preclassic period between 1500 and 200 B.C. (This massive Mayan ceremonial complex was discovered in "plain sight.")

As the Maya built out their society even further, they laid the foundations for complex trade networks, advanced irrigation, water purification and farming techniques, warfare, sports, writing, and a complex calendar. The intricate calendar included three dating systems-one for the gods, one for civil life, and a third astronomical calendar known as the Long Count. The starting point of this third calendar was set at the legendary date of humans' creation, corresponding to August 11, 3114 B.C. The Long Count calendar began a new cycle on December 21, 2012, leading to a myth that the world would end on that date. (Despite urban legends and longstanding misinterpretations of Maya lore, however, the shift in calendar cycle didn't bring doomsday with it.)

Mayan society at its peak

During the Classic period (200-900 A.D.), the Maya civilization reached its peak. So did its architecture: the Maya refined its pyramid-like temples and grand buildings that appear to be palaces, though it's unclear if they were actually used as elite residences or if they served some other function.

Among the most important Maya cities were Palenque, Chichén Itzá, Tikal, Copán, and Calakmul. But though the Maya shared a society, it was not an empire. Instead, city-states and local rulers vacillated between peaceful coexistence and wrestling for control. Some places, such as the village of Joya de Cerén, seem to have been run by collective rule instead of an elite overlord. (Read more about Palenque, a Mayan city that was a glorious center of power.)

Maya architecture and art reflected deep-seated religious beliefs. The Maya embraced the belief of K'uh and k'uhul-that divinity could be found in all things, even inanimate objects. Once again, corn was vital to those beliefs: Among the most important Maya gods was Hun Hunahpu, the maize god, and Maya tradition held that the deities created humans first out of mud, then wood, then corn.

The Maya worshiped their gods with a variety of rituals. Among them were both human sacrifice and bloodletting-customs that capture modern imaginations. The Maya sport of pitz, a forerunner of soccer, had its own ritual implications: Researchers think losers of the game were sometimes sacrificed in recognition of the Maya sun and moon gods, who were said to have played the same game in the Maya creation myth, the Popol Vuh.

How the Maya civilization collapsed

Although some northern cities continued to flourish, the majority of Maya centers began to collapse during the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. Inter-city relations soured, warfare increased, trade declined, and the death rate rose.

Theories as to the civilization's demise vary. One hypothesis, backed by climate simulations, is that a long drought-combined with slash-and-burn farming techniques that destroyed the forests upon which the Maya relied- are what brought disaster to their doorstep. Suddenly, once wealthy city centers became deserted wastelands as some Maya died and others scattered to a variety of more fertile, mountainous lands to the south. As once massive cities like Chichén Itza fell, cities like Mayapán rose in prominence. Other Maya people abandoned cities altogether, settling into small villages instead.

Though the Maya people persisted, the downfall of Maya civilization left those who remained vulnerable to the pressures of European colonization beginning in the 1500s. By the time Spain fully conquered the Maya around 1524, the majority of the Maya's most important cities had already been abandoned.

Meanwhile, the newly arrived Spanish explorers paid little attention to the ruins that lay scattered throughout their colonies even as they seized Maya lands and forced its Indigenous people to convert to Christianity.

Rediscovering the Maya

It wasn't until the 1840s that the Maya were "rediscovered" by explorers and researchers who were intrigued by the hints of the civilization they had left behind. American attorney and diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood led a series of archaeological expeditions to Central America, where they mapped and documented Maya sites.

Though the existence of ruins in the area was known, many Europeans assumed that Indigenous Central Americans were primitive and unintelligent and had not created the historic artifacts beneath their feet. Stephens and Catherwood wanted to prove them wrong and establish both the worth of the sites and the identities of their creators.

Despite being convinced of the former glory of the Maya, the two researchers also tried to profit from what they found, even attempting to purchase entire Maya cities and transport them to a New York museum. Nonetheless, their work forced the world to take notice of Maya civilization and lay a foundation for future archaeological discoveries.

Today, the field of Maya archaeology is flourishing, and modern excavations have revealed everything from ruins to religious relics in the jungle that once reclaimed them. Scholars are still attempting to discover more about the Maya, their ambitious rise, and mysterious fall. (How researchers used lasers to discover a Mayan pyramid in Tikal.)

While archaeological relics may be all that's left of their past, the Maya still exist in the present. More than six million Maya descendants live in modern Central America, where more than 30 languages stemming from ancient Mayan are still spoken. These descendants also keep many Mayan agricultural, religious, and land management traditions alive-a sign of their culture's resilience in the face of centuries of challenge and change.

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Who were the Maya? Decoding the ancient civilization's secrets

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The pyramid-building society reigned over much of Central America until it collapsed. Today, its descendants keep many traditions alive-a sign of resilience.

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Traditions and flavor of the holidays (food and music)

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Traditions and flavor of the holidays (food and music)

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Thanksgiving in the United States often reminds people of food, but it is also celebrated in Mexico where they enjoy a different array of dishes for the feast. It is not as popular in Mexico as it is in America but it most people still feast on an important main course: turkey. In fact, many traditional Thanksgiving dishes originate from Mexico. Other dishes common to Mexican cuisine like tamales, empanadas, and mole are part of Thanksgiving in Mexico. Rather than starting around evening like most Thanksgiving dinners in America, Thanksgiving dinners in Mexico typically start later at 9pm. Thanksgiving in Mexico has recently grown in popularity and grocery stores have been stocking their shelves with common Mexican Thanksgiving products.

Christmas in more popular in Mexico than Thanksgiving is. Common foods eaten on Christmas in Mexico are: pavo navideno, volteado de pina, and menudo. Volteado de pina is a pineapple upside down cake. Pavo navideno is a whole turkey dish with potato stuffing served with gravy. There is a lot of Mexican music that is easily recognized by other countries. One example of this is the Spanish Christmas song, Feliz Navidad. Releasedin 1970, Feliz Navidad is was bilingual hit. It became popular about a year after its release and has since then been covered by many Famous musical artists. It has also appeared in many famous movies and is also popular among families in both Mexico and the United States.

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Mexico is very unique and rich in culture. Their dishes have very robust flavor and characteristics. They may not have all the same commonly-known qualities as other nations' holidays, but they continue to please others who try their traditions. The holidays in the U.S. are not celebrated as widely in Mexico but they still have a similar spirit. Some Mexican holiday traditions are derived from different concepts and ideas as the ones in America. Both countries draw from each other's traditions.

Mexican holiday music is very popular even though some common holidays are not celebrated as much there. There traditions and rituals are mainly derived from the bible and involve honoring its ideas. The holiday food that people worldwide can relate to has its own twist put on it in Mexico. The holidays there also involve some exciting parades. Their holidays also often have traditions to honor things. In conclusion, Mexico has its own unique way of celebrating the holidays.