Flor de Nochebuena

A brief history of the poinsettia

In last July’s article Hecho en Mexico, I talked a bit about things Mexico has given the world. When I wrote that article, I had the amazing foresight to omit poinsettias - thereby allowing me to talk about this flower now, on the eve of Christmas, where discussions about poinsettias clearly belong.

Origins

The cuetlaxōchitl - that Nahuatl name for poinsettia - was first cultivated by the Aztecs. Cuetlaxōchitltranslates to “excrement flower” - so called because birds would eat the flower’s seed and later drop them, where the seed would then germinate and grow out of the bird’s excrement. But enough of that. The cuetlaxōchitl was an important plant for the Aztecs, who used it to both produce red dye, and as an anti-fever medication.

Association with Christmas

Sometime in the 16th century, a legend grew in Mexico of a young girl named Pepita who was too poor to offer a gift for the baby Jesus at a Christmas Eve church service. One version of the legend tells that Pepita’s cousin comforted Pepita in her grief about not having a gift to bring by telling her that Jesus doesn’t care what or how small the gift is - anything would do. So on the way to church, she stopped to pick some weeds as her Christmas offering. Another version tells that an angel descended from the heavens and instructed Pepita to pick weeds as her offering. Regardless, off to church Pepita went one fateful Christmas Eve with a handful of weeds, which she placed at the church’s nativity scene. After being placed there, the weeds suddenly transformed into poinsettia flowers.

Soon after, Mexicans hearing of this legend began referring to the cuetlaxōchitl flower as the flor de nochebuena - literally, “Christmas Eve flower”. Later in the 17th century, Franciscan friars in Mexico started using the flor de nochebuena during Christmas services - noting that the flowers star shape recalled the Star of Bethlehem, and the flower’s red color, the blood of Christ.

Origin of the “poinsettia” name and worldwide popularity

In the early 1800s, the U.S. appointed its first official “envoy” to Mexico - a man named Joel Roberts Poinsett. Mr. Poinsett witnessed the tradition of the flor de nochebuena and brought some plants back to the United States, where cultivators began growing the plant, and naming it after Poinsett.

But it took another century for the poinsettia to become associated with Christmas in the U.S. and, eventually, around the world. In the later part of the 1900s, a grower named Paul Ecke Jr., who owned a large nursery in Encinitas, California, began heavily promoting the plant as a seasonal Christmas flower. With appearances on The Tonight Show and Bob Hope holiday specials - their sets festooned with plants provided by Ecke’s nursery - Ecke cast the poinsettia into the Christmas limelight with such success that today, the poinsettia is the world’s most economically important potted plant.

Feliz Navidad

Wherever in the world you are, if you celebrate Christmas - with or without flor de nochebuana - then Feliz Navidad, Merry Christmas.

Thank you for reading this brief but topical ode to a Christmas flower. And thank you for being a Mexico Listo reader. I hope today finds you sharing the company of the people you love, in a place that gives you comfort.

Happy Holidays to you all.