The Colored Paper Affair
LOVE OF COLORED PAPER is as Mexican as tortillas, tacos, or tequila. There are fiestas all year round and each one is festooned and bright with multi-colored streamers, flowers, and bows; fringed, folded, and fluted. No wedding, birthday, or anniversary can be celebrated without colored paper.
Folded into a block, designs are cut and then strung out in lengths to decorate streets, fronts of homes, stores, or churches.
Parades call for line after line of colored paper, twisted and furled across streets, wrapped around lampposts, draped on refreshment tables and push-carts.
"What is going on?" The gala scene stuns the traveler.
"It is the fiesta of _______, amigo." Big, black eyes are round with the wonder of it all. Big smiles and so much joy...for only the price of some colored paper and lots of work!
The riotous colors and designs celebrate different fiestas...white pompoms and streamers for the church, and for birthdays, big earthenware jars dressed in gaudy colors. Bright paper cut into fringed frills and then pasted in small squares and ruffles to form the piñata design.
Sometimes these decorations are not removed from one Christmas, one Saint's day, one birthday...to the next.
Does colored paper a fiesta make?
SI, SEÑOR.
This article originally appeared in
"Mexico Living and Travel Update",Summer 1994,
and is presented here with their kind permission.