How to Celebrate the Holidays in Mexico City

The holiday season in Mexico City (CDMX) starts in rivers of orange and flows into a sea of red and green. The already vibrant city is drenched in flowers that decorate the festivities in glorious abundance. The best market to visit during the holiday season is undoubtedly Mercado Jamaica. This is Mexico City’s central flower market, an easy subway ride or drive from the city centre. Here you will find armfuls, barrow loads, and trucks spilling over with flowers and plants. This is the source of the flow that floods the city.  

Across Mexico perhaps the most important holiday of all is Día de Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The build up starts weeks before the celebration on Nov. 1-2, with excitement building as cempasuchil (marigolds) fill the city. The municipality lines the roads with plants; the people fill the streets, adorning window boxes and shopfronts and most importantly, ofrendas (offerings), guiding the dead to the homes of their families and loved ones.

Once the departed loved ones have been celebrated by the living, the cempasuchil are taken down, and red and green Noche Buenas start to appear until they drench the city. Known elsewhere as poinsettia, these flowers are native to Mexico and Central America where they are called flores de Noche Buena. They flame brilliantly, day and night in the streets of the city.

Mercado Jamaica is an excellent place to buy decorations. Painted skulls, miniature beer bottles, and papel picado (a traditional craft paper) can all be found on the stalls ready for ofrendas. Beginning in mid-November there are Christmas trees, lights, wooden nativity scenes with living moss gardens, and all the figurines to place inside. Stings of paper streamer and garlands woven from palm leaves are draped across the stalls.

Hanging high above visitors’ heads are suspended armies of piñatas, all made by hand from paper mache and carefully painted — they come in a vast variety of shapes and sizes. You’ll see superheroes, princesses, geometric stars, and Lucha Libre characters all waiting to be filled with candy and bashed apart to burst open for the children beneath.  

At Jamaica and at each local market across the city, you won’t step far without finding food, both as an ingredient and to eat. Each barrio across CDMX has its own covered market. Some of the best local markets are Mercado Medellín in Roma Sur and Coyacan Market, which has an excellent artisan crafts market close by. These are places to buy a cornucopia of fresh fruit and vegetables, cheese, chickens, mole, dried chilies, beans, and herbs. The center of every market is always food.  

Look a little deeper and you will discover comida corridas, small restaurants with freshly made daily menus; an array of stalls with tacos cooked to order and unfathomably delicious; great mountains of crispy chicharrón, and ripe fruit ready to be juiced. At Christmas time look out for hot clay mugs of ponche, a spiced, punch made with fresh and dried fruits and spices.  

After Christmas, to celebrate the coming of the kings with gifts, there is a sweet bread called Rosca del Reyes (King Cake) that’s shaped in a ring and decorated with candied fruits. It’s eaten on (and around) Jan. 6. Hidden inside it is a small figurine of the baby Jesus. The person who finds the baby in their slice is supposed to make or provide tamales for everyone they shared the Rosca with on Feb. 2.

Be prepared for the holiday season to extend well into the new year.