For nine nights before Christmas, Mexican neighbourhoods stage a musical about being refused a room. Las Posadas is a travelling re-enactment of Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter — sung at real front doors, refused at every one but the last — and it has run for more than four hundred years.
Nine nights, one door that opens
From 16 to 24 December — nine nights, for the nine months of Mary’s pregnancy — a procession moves through the neighbourhood at dusk, children often dressed as angels and shepherds. At each house they sing the pedir posada, asking for lodging; the household sings back a refusal. Only at the final, prearranged house does the song change, the door open, and the party begin — food, piñatas, and everyone into the house that said yes.
A missionary’s invention
The custom traces to Fray Diego de Soria, an Augustinian prior in central Mexico, who obtained papal permission in 1587 for special pre-Christmas masses with a procession of Mary and Joseph. Four centuries on, his liturgical device is a neighbourhood institution across Mexico and much of Latin America — and, structurally, it is a politer cousin of British wassailing: door-to-door singing with an expectation of eventual hospitality, minus the menaces about figgy pudding.
Source: Franciscan Media
Processions are a group activity
Nine nights of coordinated neighbourhood singing is the most committed group performance in the Christmas calendar — the coordination lessons of matching jumpers apply in full:
Sets for the whole procession in the Matching & Couples collection.