7 Dec /15

Piñata

Piñata – Word of the day - EVS Translations
Piñata – Word of the day – EVS Translations

Most people think of piñatas as a fun activity suitable for children parties. And while piñata has been certainly intended for fun, it has a quite rich history which, surprisingly for many, started in China and was related to New Year celebrations.

Historians believe that the famous traveller Marco Polo was the first European to witness the Chinese custom of creating hollowed colourful paper figures of animals (mainly in the shape of a cow and ox), which they filled with different seeds and hit with colourful sticks as part of New Year celebrations, and as a ritual for fertility for the coming crop growing season.

Bringing the idea of those early piñatas to home, in the 14th century, the Venetians and Italians adopted and linked it with the Christian Lent celebrations.

The first Sunday of Lent became Piñata Sunday, deriving from the Italian words pignatta (earthenware cooking pot) and pigna (pine cone); as the early Italian piñatas were earthenware pots shaped like a pinecone.

The custom soon spread to Spain where, as part of Lenten celebrations, people used clay containers called la olla (from the Spanish word for pot) and from there, in the early 16th century, the Spanish conquistadors brought the ritual to Mexico, where the locals mastered the piñata creating a folklore of songs and customs around it.

The Mexicans already had a similar Aztec and Mayan rituals, with Aztec priests hanging clay pots adorned with feathers and filled with berries and nuts in temples during the birthday celebrations of the Aztec god of war. When the pot was broken, the treasures falling to the ground signified favours coming down from the gods. And Mayans playing a ritual of blindfolded people hitting a pot suspended on a string.

The Spanish missioners transformed those local rituals to serve their needs, crafting a religious piñata, which took on a satellite form with seven cones sticking out, intended to represent the seven deadly sins and the Satan himself, tempting people to become sinners, who were fighting the temptation back with sticks, which represented their virtue. The candies and fruits, which replaced the earlier used seeds, were participants’ reward for keeping the faith.

The first usage of our word, in print, in a British source, comes from 1868, from a guide book for travellers in Cuba, Puerto Rico and St. Thomas, entitled The Stranger in the Tropics: “The pinata is a large globe of paper, filled with a variety of objects, suspended over the ball-room floor.”

And the next written reference comes 3 years later, from an observer of a piñata celebration in Mexico. In 1889, Face to face with the Mexicans, Fanny Chambers Gooch: “The fun of breaking the piñate begins. It is suspended from the ceiling, and each person..blindfolded..proceeds to strike the swinging piñate”.

Nowadays, the piñata has mostly lost its religious character and has become just one part of the Mexican art of cartonería (papier-mâché sculptures), but is is still the centre point of many birthday and Christmas time celebrations in different countries around the globe, equally enjoyed by children and adults.