It's political correctness gone mad.
Sep. 9th, 2008 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davywavyA friend of mine invited me to a party recently, and, by way of a clincher to the invitation, said "We're going to have a Pinata".
Well, how could I say no to that? Smacking paper-mache animals around with the reward of tasty sugary goodness? It's like all my Christmasses come at once.
It did make me wonder where the tradition of Pinata came from and I learned that until the nay-sayers of the EU got involved, happy peasants in the Spanish uplands would use a real donkey rather than a pretend one. For hundreds of years, in time-honoured fashion, they'd force-feed a donkey with Haribo (like some sort of Iberian foie gras goose) before hoisting it by the neck into the tallest tree in the village and then encouraging the local children to hack it to bits with sharp knives and axes to get at the sweets. Ernest Hemmingway wrote about this tradition at the same time he visited the running of the bulls in Pamplona, in his book "The old man and his donkey full of Percy Pigs".
Apparently the tomatina festival (in which people throw tomatoes at each other) is another spinoff from this charming rural custom as they'd throw the viscera at each other, laughing all the while.
It's good old harmless traditions like this that the modern world is robbing us of.
Well, how could I say no to that? Smacking paper-mache animals around with the reward of tasty sugary goodness? It's like all my Christmasses come at once.
It did make me wonder where the tradition of Pinata came from and I learned that until the nay-sayers of the EU got involved, happy peasants in the Spanish uplands would use a real donkey rather than a pretend one. For hundreds of years, in time-honoured fashion, they'd force-feed a donkey with Haribo (like some sort of Iberian foie gras goose) before hoisting it by the neck into the tallest tree in the village and then encouraging the local children to hack it to bits with sharp knives and axes to get at the sweets. Ernest Hemmingway wrote about this tradition at the same time he visited the running of the bulls in Pamplona, in his book "The old man and his donkey full of Percy Pigs".
Apparently the tomatina festival (in which people throw tomatoes at each other) is another spinoff from this charming rural custom as they'd throw the viscera at each other, laughing all the while.
It's good old harmless traditions like this that the modern world is robbing us of.
