A Year of Mexican Holidays, and What Gets Cooked for Each

Month by month, the dishes tied to each Mexican celebration — and why Cinco de Mayo is not Independence Day, which is the mistake the US makes every year.

Mexican food is seasonal in a way that has little to do with produce and everything to do with the calendar. Certain dishes appear on a specific date and then vanish for a year: you do not eat rosca de reyes in March or chiles en nogada in February. For a cook in the US, the calendar is also the cheat sheet for when the ingredients show up in stores, because Mexican supermarkets stock to it.

The year, in order

When	Celebration	What is cooked
6 January	Día de Reyes (Epiphany)	Rosca de reyes, a ring-shaped sweet bread with a small figure baked inside, with hot chocolate or atole. Whoever finds the figure hosts on 2 February.
2 February	Día de la Candelaria	Tamales, by the hundred, paid for by whoever got the figure in the rosca. Atole alongside.
February / March (movable)	Carnaval, then Lent	Before Lent: rich food. During it: capirotada (a bread pudding with piloncillo syrup), tortitas de camarón, nopales, fish.
March / April (movable)	Semana Santa (Holy Week)	No meat on Friday. Bacalao a la vizcaína, romeritos, chiles rellenos, lentil soup, aguas frescas.
5 May	Cinco de Mayo	In Mexico, a regional date in Puebla: mole poblano. Almost nothing elsewhere in the country.
10 May	Día de las Madres	A big family meal — often mole, barbacoa or a seafood spread. One of the busiest restaurant days of the Mexican year.
15–16 September	Independencia	Chiles en nogada, pozole, tostadas, pambazos. Green, white and red on the table on purpose.
1–2 November	Día de Muertos	Pan de muerto, mole, tamales, calaveritas de azúcar, atole and the dead person's favorite dish, placed on the ofrenda.
12 December	Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe	Tamales and atole after the early-morning mass, often served to crowds outside churches.
16–24 December	Posadas	Ponche navideño with tejocote and guava, buñuelos, tamales, piñata candy.
24 December	Nochebuena	The main Christmas meal: bacalao, romeritos with mole, pierna de cerdo, ensalada de nochebuena.
31 December	Año Nuevo	Twelve grapes at midnight, then whatever the family cooks — frequently a repeat of Nochebuena.

Cinco de Mayo is not Independence Day

This is the one worth getting right. The 5th of May commemorates the Battle of Puebla in 1862, when a Mexican force defeated a larger French army. It is a regional holiday, observed seriously in Puebla and modestly elsewhere; schools in much of Mexico treat it as an ordinary day. Mexican independence is celebrated on the night of 15 September and the day of the 16th, with the Grito, and it is the national holiday.

In the US the proportions are reversed. Cinco de Mayo became a major commercial date — it has a long history in Mexican-American communities in California, where it was marked from the 1860s as a symbol of resistance, and it was later adopted and amplified by beverage marketing. None of that is wrong, but a US restaurant that advertises Cinco de Mayo as Mexican Independence Day is stating something false, and it happens every single year.

The dishes that only exist for a few weeks

Chiles en nogada are the clearest case: a roasted poblano stuffed with a picadillo of pork, fruit and nuts, under a walnut cream sauce, with pomegranate seeds. The ingredients — the specific walnut, the pomegranate, the criollo poblano — are at their point from late August to early October, which is exactly when the dish appears and then goes away. Ordering one in April means somebody is working with frozen components.

Pan de muerto runs from mid-October to early November. Rosca de reyes exists for about two weeks around 6 January. Capirotada appears in Lent. Ponche is a December drink. In a Mexican supermarket in the US you can watch this happen on the shelves: tejocote and sugarcane arrive in November, the pan de muerto trays come out in October, and the rosca displaces them in the last week of December.

Why the dates matter to a cook in the US

Two reasons, both practical. The first is supply: a Mexican supermarket in the United States orders to the Mexican calendar, not the American one. If you want tejocote, sugarcane, fresh guava or whole dried hibiscus in quantity, late November and December is when they are on the floor. Dried corn husks pile up before February and December. Walnuts in the shell and pomegranates appear for the chile en nogada window.

The second is company. Almost every dish on the list above is built for a group, and several are built for a group that cooks together. A tamalada is four people at a table assembling for three hours; a pozole is a pot that serves twelve. These are not weeknight recipes scaled up, they are recipes that were designed for the occasion, and halving them usually makes them worse rather than smaller.

How to cook the calendar in the US

Three of these are genuinely practical for an American household. Tamales for Candelaria or Christmas, which is a group activity and the reason a tamalada exists at all — make four dozen with four people in an afternoon. Pan de muerto, which is a straightforward enriched dough with orange blossom. And ponche, which is a pot of fruit, piloncillo and cinnamon that simmers for an hour and fills a house.

Two are harder. Chiles en nogada take a day and need specific fruit. Bacalao a la vizcaína needs salt cod started two days ahead with repeated water changes, which is easy but requires planning.

What to make

From our recipes, the calendar dishes that work best in a home kitchen here: Green Chicken Tamales and Red Pork Tamales for December and February, Mole Poblano for May and for Día de Muertos, Red Pozole for September, and Sweet Tamales for the children at a tamalada.

For the seasonal ingredients, the Mexican grocery store is the only reliable source in most of the country: our directory lists 536 of them in the US, by city, in the store directory. And if you would rather eat the holiday than cook it, the 630 restaurants in the restaurant directory include plenty that run special menus on these dates — call ahead for 10 May and 2 November, which are the two days they fill up.