Yesterday I wrote about the time that Brazil tried to replace Santa Claus with a home-grown gift-bringer named Vovo Indio. Today, you will learn about a similar attempt in Mexico.
About the same time as Brazil’s experiment, Mexico too was in a revolutionary mood, anxious to cast off old ways. In a similar ill-starred move, to boost nationalism and assert Mexican independence of American and Spanish cultural figures, the Minister of Education proposed replacing Santa Claus and the Three Kings with a pre-Columbian pagan deity. Children were urged to direct their Christmas hopes to the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl; merchants used the god in advertising – G.E. ran an ad boasting that whether it came from the Magi, Santa or Quetzalcóatl, there could be no gift like a General Electric refrigerator –and on 23 December 1930 the government constructed a replica of an Aztec temple in the national stadium where the Plumed Serpent himself delivered presents to a crowd of children, watched by an approving President Pascual Ortiz Rubio. Like Vovo Indio, Quetzalcóatl proved to have no popular appeal. Critics pointed out to the ruling regime that an Aztec god, half-bird, half-snake, was as foreign to contemporary Mexican culture as Santa Claus or the Reyes Magos.