The First Poinsettia
A Folktale from Mexico A good little village girl lived with her parents and seven other sisters and brothers in a small adobe house, shared with aunties and her grandfather too. Everyone worked very well, sometimes getting ahead, with plenty of posole and tortillas on the table. The family all worked together and made clever use of their abilities, but sometimes they did not have enough to eat. Still, the family loved each other very much and had the power of magic to light their eyes.
One day in December the girl felt inclined to visit the Goddess and leave her a present. She looked around the house, finding nothing to keep but a tiny piece of green yarn left over from her mama's weaving. She went outside to search for more. In the stone street near where water ran, she found a red feather. What a treasure! She kept looking, and found some dried out but pretty flowered weeds outside her neighborhood, and gathered them together. She tied the yarn around the weeds, and tucked in the red feather. Very pleased, the girl closed her eyes and imagined the bunch was as beautiful and big as the paper flowers for sale in the city, bright sparkling and delicate to touch. Then she set
off toward the statue of the Goddess. The peaceful Goddess looked down at her, her soft hands folded, with an expression of absolute love. Though she was carved from wood, to the little girl she seemed like a real person, and her heart felt big with happiness and sadness at the sametime. As she set the gift down at the Goddess' feet, four tears fell upon it. And as the girl backed away, her ragged bunch of weeds, magically bound with yarn and feather into a sincere offering of love, instantly transformed and grew into the gorgeous, velvet red petaled plant we now know as the Poinsettia. Amazed, she did not want to ever forget what had happened, so the little girl gathered one seed from one flower. Thanks to the Goddess, with that her
family was able to happily make their life's prosperous work from growing the Poinsettia ever after.
