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Suicides.  Popular lore long attributed them to folks buffeted by unbearable “blues” during the holiday season.  Especially around the New Year.  Now experts say most suicides in the United States occur in late spring and early summer. 

It’s the season to get jolly and many of us will be charging up our good cheer with a few hard-hitting spirits. As a result, a number of holiday aficionados will suffer from crapula. That fitting word is the Latin term for hangover. In Spanish the word is cruda, but in any language it hurts. Pliny the Elder isolated this devastating virus, calling it “A sickness of the head from gross overindulgence,” and hurried off to the public baths to cure himself. Ever since, the search for a reliable antidote has gone on, with paltry results.

On a chilly December morning in a nearby mountain pueblo, a number of people gathered at Deovijilda Lara’s tacos al vapor stand to get some warmth in their bellies. At 7 a.m., Deovijilda’s public market puesto seemed the first and warmest stand open. Dressed in several sweaters, wool knee-length stockings, faded flowered dress and an apron whose bulging pockets served as a minor pharmacy, a requisition center and a cash register, she presided over an assortment of steaming sartenes, cazuelas and ollas.

Mexico’s holiday season folk plays, called pastorelas, were once so controversial — and popular — that Catholic Church officials banned them twice in the 1700s. Over the last few decades, Mexican cultural observers are lamenting their gradual disappearance.

While many in the United States are doing a little better this winter than last, others are still feeling the economic crimp caused initially by the 2008 Great Recession. A significant portion of the United States and Mexico are on thin consumer rations.

Along with a slew of Christmas-born pastorales that will soon be taking place, especially in rural areas, all the way into February, there are a salto of gracious — and boisterous — holiday gatherings going on right now. This celebratory time turns the final page of the year into a torrent of hen-scratched reminders across a new year’s agenda as we race through dense, exhausting, heady days. So much for dreams of life in the slow-paced Jalisco highlands, where huge haciendas once dominated not only the pace of life but the pace — and health — of the economy. And, yes, even during the Nueva Galicia (as Jalisco was then officially called) Christmas and turn to the new year, the pace was quite different than it is on the very same ground today.