Every Christmas Eve of my childhood began the same way: with the soaking of corn husks. My mother would fill the largest pot we owned with warm water, submerge the husks until they softened and turned golden, and then lay them flat across the kitchen table like little rafts. The smell of them — earthy, faintly sweet, a smell you cannot describe to anyone who has not grown up with it — meant that Christmas had officially begun. Nothing else signalled it. Not the lights on the street, not the carols, not even midnight mass. The husks.
We lived in Guadalajara, in a house with a kitchen my mother ruled absolutely. She made tamales only once a year, and the event was treated with the gravity of a religious ceremony — which, in many ways, it was. Her sisters would arrive in the afternoon. My aunts, my cousins, the neighbours sometimes. Everyone had a role. The children spread masa. The adults filled. My grandmother, in her last years, sat in the corner and supervised with a frankness that tolerated no argument. The tamales were her recipe, passed to my mother, and now — after everything — passed to me.
I moved to Chicago when I was twenty-six. I moved again within Chicago, and again, the way you do in a new country when you are still deciding who you are trying to become. My mother visited twice. The second time, she came in December, and we made tamales together in my apartment kitchen, the two of us at the counter instead of a house full of women, just enough masa for twenty, not the hundred she used to make. She did not complain about the smaller number. She said, ‘The flavour doesn’t change with quantity.’
She died in March of 2022, of a heart attack, in the house in Guadalajara. I got the call at six in the morning. I flew back for the funeral and stayed for two weeks, and when I returned to Chicago I found, in the back of my suitcase, a plastic bag of dried chillies I had taken from her kitchen without thinking. Guajillo. Ancho. Her chillies, from her cabinet. I put them in my own cabinet and did not open them for eight months.
The first Christmas after she died, I almost did not make the tamales. It seemed too large a thing to do alone. But on the twenty-third of December I found myself soaking the husks anyway, the way you sometimes find yourself doing things before you have decided to do them. I stood at my kitchen counter and spread masa and filled each tamal with the rajas and cheese she had taught me, and I cried for about forty minutes, and then I stopped crying and just kept working, because the folding requires concentration and she would have been impatient with sloppiness.
I made thirty that year. I ate four and gave the rest to my neighbours, a Puerto Rican family on the second floor who left a card under my door the next morning saying they were the best tamales they had ever eaten. I did not know them well enough to explain what that meant to me. I still make thirty every Christmas Eve. Alone, at midnight, the husks soaking in the big pot, the smell filling the apartment the way it once filled a house in Guadalajara. I used the last of her chillies in the third year. By then I knew where to buy more.
