This time of year almost all “extranjeros” Bloggers living in Mexico will be writing and showing photos about the celebrations. There are a lot of them. If you want to read and see photos about the season you have but to look over to the left on my Blog site and visit Decembers past.

Here in Mexico by the end of November through February second it is virtually non-stop celebrating.

Streets get closed; some will be ‘painted’ with colored sawdust designs; some adorned with shrines; some will have firework laden wooden framed ‘toros’ darting and dodging about with colorful rockets exploding in all directions, and still others with have real live bulls terrorizing borrachos (those in various stages of inebriation) within erected fence lined streets.

There will be music trucks with gargantuan speaker boxes driven by huge fire breathing amplifiers – dancing in the streets. Groups of the faithful in numbers that crowd and block streets as they follow behind hoisted plaster Madonna’s like mice behind the Pied Piper.

In each procession there is one or more young hombre in charge of igniting rockets lifting off from meter length sticks. A breathy whoosh and three or four seconds later a report that can be heard for a mile – more perhaps. The blasts start by 5 AM and continue until just a few hours before it will start all over again.

Dirt floor clap boarded shacks to the classiest casas display colorful shrines honoring the Madonna and occasionally even the birth of Jesus by way of a nativity scene.

This year we are touring around Xico on our little scooter stopping for the parades and looking into windows and open doorways to see the beautiful, colorful alters – it is really something to see the results of the energy, effort and faith.

Today is still more special. December 12, 1531 on a hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image appeared miraculously on the cloak of a simple indigenous peasant by the name of Juan Diego.

That milargo is one of the high points of the season. The Mother of Jesus, her likeness emblazoned on this simple hombre’s coat on a hill in our adopted country lo those many years ago.

I woke up early this special day prepared to celebrate; to watch the running of the bulls in Ursulo Galvan and later the running of many fiery wood framed rocket launcher toros in the city of Xico. As I lay in bed I started thinking about our unlikely hero Juan Diego.

Since I wasn’t around back in 1531 I can only imagine how the fame might have affected Juan Diego. I mean here was a simple guy, a peasant, cast into apparent perpetual fame. If this event were to have happened in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century instead of the sixteenth century I imagined we would be seeing Juan Diego on Ed Sullivan or Oprah. There might be a line of jackets carrying the Juan Diego brand name and the Holy Mother’s image.

I imagined just what a good agent might do for a simple peasant like Juan Diego – even his name has a certain ring to it; T-shirts to cereal boxes to major endorsements this guy would be going places.

We don’t know if Juan was married. I imagined how different the holiday might be if our unlikely hero got caught cheating on his esposa. The endorsements might dry up and perhaps the entire holiday tarnished from his bad behavior?

Juan Diego was lucky to have fallen into fame before the paparazzi might have exposed his life to the public in an unsavory light – Hallelujah!

Our unlikely hero’s part was minor, his plaster statute is always smaller than that of the Madonna; yet here nearly 500 years later this simple indigenous peasant maintains his lofty place in history. I am glad for that because today will be a very good time here in Mexico – wish you were here (well at least for a visit). Stay Tuned!