How the Christmas Season is Celebrated in Honduras

How the Christmas Season is Celebrated in Honduras

Every nation and culture has its own way of celebrating Christmas and New Years. In Honduras there are influences both from the Roman Catholic background and from the ancient indigenous practices.

Food:

Turkey is not generally on the menu at Christmas time. It is relatively much more expensive than in Canada or the USA.

The most common food you will find around Christmas time are tamales. These tamales are not exactly the same as Mexican tamales. For one thing, they are bigger, and have a larger proportion of pastry to it.  The pastry is made of maseca (corn flour). It can contain onion, cooked rice, green pepper, peas, cilantro, pork or chicken, cumin, potatoes, and tomato paste.  Sometimes there is very little content, but the more interesting ones have all or most of these ingredients. Thy are cooked wrapped in banana leaves.

Chocolate is not found in abundance as we have in Canada. It, too, is relatively expensive for Hondurans.

Desert usually consists of “torrejas”. One recipe says: “Think of thick French toast, submerged in a bath of sweet syrup, with cinnamon!” These are generally served only at Christmas and New Year’s.

Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, there is generally a church service, after which people go to their homes to fire off fire crackers. These can vary from light staccato sounds, to a whistling sound, to what can almost sound like small bombs! In Honduras, fire works don’t seem to be as popular as in Spain. Sound seems to be the principle attraction. People light fires, either in their yard, or, more often, in the road or street in front of their houses, and light the fire crackers from a burning stick.  Young people will generally meet in one person’s home and stay up all night. Roberto, who was living with us for three months, went to the home of one of the church families, with a group of young people, and at 2:00 am, they went off to the market place to buy more firecrackers! This is in a country where people don’t normally want to go out after dark because of the insecurity.