I am of a very pale descent and a very homogenized culture. Growing up, our food traditions were pretty bland, to be honest: Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas sugar cookies, birthday cake, the end. My ethnic background is English, Irish, German and Swedish, but the most ethnic we ever got was a Sunday roast. We were definitely not running around eating corned beef, strudel, or lutefisk.

That is not to say our tastes were not diverse; they just weren’t tied to events. My lasagna is not too shabby. My mom might very well make the best beef enchiladas in Illinois—when we moved to Illinois in the late 1970s, she actually went into the one Mexican restaurant in town and bribed them to sell her corn tortillas because the only taco shells on grocery store shelves were the Taco Bell crunchy preformed variety and that was entirely unacceptable. My father was more adventurous; we used to get one sausage pizza for my mom and me and another one for him with all kinds of pollution like peppers and mushrooms and olives. I was nine or ten when I went to a birthday party and discovered the miracle that is pepperoni—and from there my mom and I became total carnivore All the Meat Except Canadian Bacon Pizza women, which we remain to this day.

The story with tamales is similar—I was a teen-ager and someone took me to a place in Florida that might have been a Chi-Chi’s or was at least very similar. I knew that Mexican food outside my mother’s kitchen came with all kinds of pitfalls that I would embarrass myself by not eating—slimy onions and peppers, spittable bits of olive, I have a lot of hangups. So I was perusing the menu and saw “tamale”—meat in cornmeal. Sign me up!

Readers, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. From that day to this, tamales are my go-to order at Mexican places.

Then I moved to California for college and found out that my aunt’s family had this super weird tradition I had never heard of that revolved around eating tamales at Christmas. For a long time, her parents made them, then she started buying them from Olvera Street—made a special trip and everything. I think I managed to participate in this tradition once, but since my school years were spent going home for Christmas and the subsequent years were spent working for newspapers and rarely getting time off anywhere near anything resembling a holiday, I missed most of those gatherings. And then I moved away, so that was that.

Eventually, I stepped out of my sheltered existence and learned that this Christmas business was quite common and quite social—there was a whole thing about getting the entire family involved in making 900 of them at a go and then eating them as a crowd. I absolutely love this. I tried to get my family to go for it, and we did it once. They turned out fine, but the tradition didn’t take. My husband and kid aren’t big on the filling, my mom calls the cornmeal coating Boring in Extremis, and since there are generally only four of us at most and everyone likes to be in charge, it’s nigh impossible to make a family activity out of it.

Anyone have a family that does this who might want to adopt me for one day a year?