Tamale Season Hats

A tamalada is a tamale-making party, a family assembly line that runs from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve. The word tamale comes from the Aztec tamalli, meaning wrapped, and in Texas and the Southwest the tamales are Christmas Eve, Nochebuena, food. In New Mexico the saying is that Christmas without tamales is like Thanksgiving without turkey. The jobs are ranked: one person soaks the husks, one makes the masa, one spreads it, the kids add filling and a tia folds, and spreading is the senior job. One participant remembered December as the month of making tamales, when you did not drop by unless you wanted to be put to work. Masa cooks check it with the float test, dropping a small piece in water to see whether it floats right back up. These Tamale Season hats are for that line. The badges name the season, the party and the crew, and the sentence designs are about rank: the one allowed only to soak the husks, the one who spreads masa faster than all the tias, the float test that never lies, and tamales over turkey. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured cotton dad hat.