Las Posadas

Las Posadas, "the lodgings", is the Mexican and wider Latin American novena kept on the nine nights before Christmas, 16-24 December, re-enacting Mary and Joseph's search for shelter in Bethlehem. Each evening a procession, sometimes led by children carrying images of the holy travellers, goes from house to house; at each door the pilgrims sing a request for lodging and are refused in song, until at the appointed house they are admitted and the night turns to prayer and celebration, with a pinata, traditionally a seven-pointed star for the seven deadly sins, and food.

The custom developed in New Spain, credited to the missionary friars of the sixteenth century who used dramatised devotion to teach the nativity, and it absorbed and replaced older midwinter observance. The nine nights are sometimes explained as the nine months of the pregnancy. Las Posadas remains a living neighbourhood and parish devotion across Mexico and Central America and among Latino communities elsewhere, culminating on Christmas Eve; it is a clear instance of catechesis turned into a durable popular festival, in which the whole street becomes the stage for the gospel story.

Church groups and immigrant advocacy organisations in the United States and Mexico have in recent years staged Las Posadas reenactments specifically at or near the US-Mexico border, drawing an explicit and deliberate parallel between Mary and Joseph's search for lodging in the traditional story and the situation of contemporary migrants and asylum seekers turned away or held at the border, a modern application of the novena's core imagery to a current social and political issue that some participating churches frame as a natural extension of the story's own theme of a family refused shelter, while the practice remains one specific use among several rather than the only or official way the observance is kept.

This border reenactment sits alongside the traditional neighbourhood and parish Las Posadas processions that continue as an ordinary, largely apolitical Christmas devotion across Mexico, Central America and Latino communities elsewhere, so that the same nine-night ritual structure this entry's first article describes now supports both a centuries-old domestic Advent custom teaching children the nativity story and, in specific organised instances, a deliberately political public demonstration addressing a contemporary humanitarian issue using exactly the same traditional script and songs.