Cinco de Mayo is a pretty recent holiday in the American mainstream. I’m aware it goes back a ways in Mexico and presumably Mexican-Americans have been celebrating it. But as an American holiday celebrating Mexican-American culture (the way St Patrick’s Day is for Irish-American culture) it’s only been ten or fifteen years. There certainly were no stores having Cinco de Mayo sales of Corona beer and tamales when I was growing up.
You’re still okay until you start wanting to celebrate Cinco De Mayo. It’s a fairly minor historical event, nominally a Mexican victory over a French incursion, 1860’s about, close to the time of the US Civil War. If the French had succeeded, it might have been a problem for US interests.
The event is not much recognized by anyone in Mexico. Still, it’s been picked up in the past few years by some parts of the US as a reason to celebrate Mexican culture. And drink Mexican beer. No, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Ninja’d!
I’ve heard the movie “Love, Actually” described as a “timeless holiday classic” and an “enduring iconic film.” The movie isn’t even 20 years old.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the wooden pickle the kid in Bad Santa makes for Billy Bob Thornton (although the movie was set in Phoenix).
No, that would be Showa Day.
There are people still alive who wouldn’t eat it, at Thanksgiving or any other time, if it were the only dish on the table. I have never ever been near this dish in my life, not even at the kids’ table. Are you sure that isn’t a regional thing? Or a wet dream of the fried onion people?
The song “Alice’s Restaurant” had been around for decades, but I never heard of it being called “The Thanksgiving song” until a few years ago. Maybe 2002ish, but no earlier. Until the interwebs got a hold of it, only the serious hippies and 3:00am disc jockeys knew the song. (jockies? Doesn’t look right.)
My Grandmother had the set too. One red, one green, and both already worn and dusty in the early 70’s when I played with them. I still haven’t read that book. Need to get that one.
Meh. It’s not gastronomy, but I’ll have a bite. Mostly for the fried onions. I’d say it’s a pretty widely known recipe. Most families will tend to sneer a little at it, but they keep making it each year and eating the onions off the top.
Not really. If Mexican-Americans celebrate it, it’s mostly because they’re picking it up from non-Mexican Americans. It was originally mostly a local celebration in Puebla, so if someone came from there, they might be into it.
Right. It has been promoted by vendors to sell Doritos and beer.
And speaking of posers, Corona is the ultimate fake. The company deliberately insinuated its beer into the culture of North Americans on spring break, as though it were some kind of “authentic” Mexican beer, but it never had the intention of being any good. Really it’s the crappiest piss water you can imagine. It’s sold purely on the basis of this highly contrived and totally bogus image, and it anyone who buys it is a dupe.
It (the wider commercialization of it) has gotta be older than that. Maybe not by much, but in freaking Budapest there was a Mexican-American restaurant that closed off the street and celebrated Cinco de Mayo every year when I lived there back in 1998-2003. (I first attended their Cinco de Mayo party in 2000.) I certainly remember it being somewhat popular at least as far back as the early-to-mid 90s. Heck, Liz Phair has a song from '94 called “Cinco de Mayo” on her album Whip Smart, and she’s as suburban whitebread as they get.
Spaghetti Carbonara - the classic Italian pasta dish - dates way back to the 1950s.
And tiramisu was invented in the 60s!
It wasn’t even that big a thing in Ireland until the twin powerhouses of American tourism and Guinness advertising blew it up bigly.
That’s how we got Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in the first place - he was a 1939 advertising gimmick for Montgomery Ward.
Both my wife’s and my families had these when we were growing up. Both of us grew up in areas with big German-American communities, so it could either have been started in the US or been brought over and then faded into obscurity in the old country.
and ciabatta dates from 1982!
In Belgium, Halloween was something you saw in American movies. Then, in 1996 or 1997, I noticed some isolated decorations in a few homes. The following year, it was absolutely everywhere, as if we had all secretly decided “yeah, let’s celebrate the shit out of this!” 
.
The speed with which this well-known but foreign pratice was adopted was mind-boggling .
I’ve always liked the cartoon which appeared some decades ago in the (now defunct) British humorous magazine Punch. A complaining pub diner is receiving the reply: “Fish fingers and chips [French fries] – that’s what the ploughman has for lunch.”
In western NY, maybe, but here in Arizona it was around at least back to the 70s. Now, as others have pointed out, like St. Patrick’s Day* it’s really an Anglo excuse for drinking heavily. Any immigrants joining in is because they like to drink, too; in Mexico I’d suppose it’s on about the same level of celebration as D-day is here.
I allowed that as a possibility as well, but the evidence so far seems to point to it being a completely American invention. You’d think there’d be some record somewhere in Germany of such a tradition, even if it died out.
On a seasonal note, and again not all that lately come but later than I would have guessed, it appears that all classic Easter candies, including chocolate eggs and jelly beans, date back only to the 1800s and didn’t really take off till the 20th century.
Ditto for the so-called “age-old tradition” of the Christmas peppermint pig.