faboo mama

I had never seen Las Posadas before and I thought the kids would be fascinated.

First off, let me address the City of LA…Yeah, in regards to parking near Olvera St. Would it be possible to have something affordable? And know-it-alls, it was $14 to park at Union Station, so don’t tell me to walk. YesmI should have gone with my original plan of taking the train from So. Pasadena over there, but we were running late and if we had, we would have missed everything. Besides, even if we snagged a spot in the full lots ($6), then it would actually cost us more to take the bus/train. So that’s that…better parking near Olvera St.

Okay, so we got there a little late. We missed all the dancers. The Folklorico dancers were cleaning up when we got there. Ilia loves Folklorico dancers. I did find out that the bandstand gets turned into a HUGE nativity scene:

Nativity scenes freak me out. Much like clowns or mimes for some people…that’s nativity scenes for me. The bigger and more life-like, the weirder I feel…I find them kind of sacrilegious. Don’t ask me why. At any rate, I must admit that was impressive. The level of detail in the entire scene is awesome. I snapped quite a few photos from different angles, but haven’t uploaded them.

No one could explain to me who these people were and what they did. I’m like, “Why are you taking pictures of them?” “Because they’re posing.” Oy.

And just like in the Bible there were burros and Santa:

Okay, I’m being snarky. The Santa was pretty funny, he was probably like 20 and most kids were hep to what was going on. We were walking behind a dad and his two girls and one of the little girls said, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” and the Santa looking up and Ho’d back at her, she then said, “Ho? HoHoHOHo?” The dad turned and looked at her like she lost her mind, me and Santa are laughing and I said, “Oh great! Your daughter speaks Santa.” Some other guy said, “Yeah, you should be so proud of her being bilingual. Do you call her The Santa Whisperer?”

I already mentioned in a previous post how I had never seen the Church before. We walked around a bit and came up this:

Thousands and thousands of flowers and candles. All that vegetative stuff there? Those are bouquets.

A different viewpoint:

All that on floor are candles. I guess they take them out the church at the end of the day. There were 6 altars (is that the right word?) full of candles in the church courtyard. I was trying to explain this whole thing to Ilia, but I’m not Catholic or Mexican, so it was sketchy at best, pulling from what I remember friends telling me. DH was useless, as every answer was, “How the hell am I supposed to know? I just went to Catholic schools!” Yes, from elementary school through college. You’d think he’d picked up something.

The candlelight procession started at 7:30, so we used the extra time to window shop. Man, I found a bunch of stuff I really, really want and it was dirt cheap. There was a poncho that I just adored. $20. A mask that I seen selling for $85 in a shop over on La Brea was $13 here. But wait! The procession is beginning!

Pretty neat, huh?

The Las Posadas - Olvera St. by faboo mama, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.