While many families in the Golden Triangle will spend the Christmas holidays eating turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and more, not everyone follows this menu.

For Isabel and Randy Vanegas, their family’s Christmas menu comes from Mexico, and it often includes tamales.

“Growing up, we had turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes and sweet potato casserole and macaroni and rolls,” Randy said. “We got married and Christmas came up and instead we had ceviche and we had tamales and we had tostadas. It was a good change.”

While Randy’s father and grandparents are from Mexico, he grew up primarily in Hamilton. But Isabel grew up in Oaxaca, Mexico, selling tamales her mother made to her neighbors starting when she was six or seven years old.

When she was 15-years-old, Isabel moved to the United States, and eventually made her way to Columbus, where she started her food truck, Taco Amigos. Since then, Isabel has primarily made tamales for her business, making batches twice a week.

But when she is not making tamales for work, Isabel also makes them for her family, passing on Christmas traditions she learned from her childhood. Growing up, the women of her family would make hundreds, if not thousands of tamales together every year on Christmas Eve.

“Everybody helped to make tamales, because they make a ton of tamales,” Isabel said. “They gave out tamales for everybody, because that’s the tradition of making tamales for the community and the church.”

When it comes to cooking tamales, Isabel said she and her female relatives do not use exact measurements. Instead, she cooks by feel, ensuring she is making tamales the same way her mother used to make them.

Each family member often takes a different spot in the tamale assembly line, Isabel said, often standing in the same place and performing the same task for hours. But she said the time, aching feet and backaches are worth it for the finished product.

Preparing tamales on her own, Isabel starts by soaking corn husks or with toasting banana leaves to make them pliable. Banana leaves are primarily used for tamale wrappers in Oaxaca and farther south in Mexico, and are often harvested fresh, Randy said.

“The banana leaf does something different to it,” Randy said. “It doesn’t give it a chlorophyll taste but it keeps it moister.”

These are called Tamales Oaxaqueños, Isabel said. Corn husks are primarily used farther north in Mexico.

After the wrappers are prepared, Isabel cooks onions, tomatoes, jalapenos and Mexican cheese to create tamales de rajas de queso, one of her primary tamale fillings. She also fills her tamales with shredded chicken and seasoned, thickened homemade salsa, which becomes a red sauce.

After creating these fillings, Isabel hand-mixes masa harina with lard, water and chicken broth to create a sticky, thick dough. This dough is then rolled into balls which are individually placed in a wrapper and flattened onto the inside, forming a coating inside of the wrapper.

Once all of the wrappers are coated with the masa dough, Isabel places filling inside of each wrapper. Each tamale filled with rajas de queso also received two pieces of Fud queso fresco inside. She then carefully folds the wrapper closed around the fillings, making sure each tamale is fully enclosed.

Finally, all the tamales are placed into a large pot on the stove filled with a few cups of water at the bottom. The water is then kept at a simmer, allowing the tamales to steam for a full hour.

Typically, Isabel said, the women of her family work to do this together quickly, as they each work mostly off of muscle memory and know their assigned tasks. But making a small batch with minimal help took her about four hours.

“It’s got to be made with love,” Isabel said. “It takes time to make it.”

Once tamales have been prepared, Isabel said, they are often used for a few different traditions around Christmas in Mexico. This included churches working together to make tamales and then passing them out around midnight at the end of Christmas Eve Mass, along with coffee.

Another Mexican Christmas tradition including tamales, Isabel said, is Las Posadas, which is celebrated between Dec. 16-24.

“It’s like singing Christmas carols,” Randy said. “Like Mary going and asking if she can stay at their house before Jesus was born. I didn’t know anything about it, because we didn’t grow up in it, but when she was explaining it to me, she said she loved it as a little kid because they would start at one end of the street and work their way around.”

Isabel said in many small towns, Las Posadas is celebrated by going door to door singing. With neighbors coming to visit, many would prepare tamales, cookies, coffee, drinks and other foods to welcome them.

While Randy did not grow up in Mexico and did not participate in Las Posadas himself as a child, he said he and Isabel have tried to introduce the tradition to their family and American friends, even while living in Hamilton and working in Columbus.

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