Dia de Reyes and Daniel's Birthday

January 6th is a special day in our home because it's Daniel's birthday, but in Mexico it's also a holiday called Dia de Reyes or Kings' Day.  This is celebrated 12 days after Christmas, and it celebrates the arrival of the Magi bringing gifts for the Christ child.  Kids in Mexico get gifts on this day, left by the three kings.  Many children get gifts from both Santa and the magi.

Before Christmas, you could find Santa in the malls for children to take their pictures with, and here you can see that the three kings also pose for pictures with the kids before Dia de Reyes.

This is a Rosca De Reyes, a traditional sweet bread shaped like a wreath that is eaten on Dia de Reyes.  We picked this one up at Costco, and shared it with Laura for Family Home Evening.

Daniel

Baked into the Rosca de Reyes is a plastic baby Jesus.  There were probably six or seven dolls baked into the wreath that we purchased.  Chiara was thrilled when she got a baby in her bread!

Tradition is that the person who gets the baby has to host the party on Dia de Candelaria on Febuary 2nd.  On this day, tamales are served.  We also had rosca with the ward and Karl shared one with one of his groups at school. Suspicously, his piece held the baby and the students demanded their tamales for La Candelaria. Fortunately, one of the ward members is a professional "tamalero" and he provided a bag full of tamales to share with the students.

The nice thing about not having an oven is that we get to try some of the desserts at Costco that always look so good, but we usually don't buy.  Daniel picked this chocolate cake for his birthday.  It was delicious.  Karl is adding a sparkler to the candles.  We celebrated on January 5th since Laura was leaving early the next morning.

The candles were the kind that relit!

Daniel loved the tradition of taking a bite of cake without a fork!

YUM!

On January sixth we celebrated with the ward with an enormous Rosca de Reyes and a hot drink called atole.