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OGDEN — Juan Reyes operates a Mexican bakery in Ogden and has been particularly busy, of late, baking batches and batches of rosca de reyes — or three kings bread — for his customers.
"They like the tradition, eating rosca," he said.
The bread is consumed on Día de los Reyes, Three Kings Day in English, and Amado Valdivia, who works at Princess Bakery with Reyes, said in Mexico the day is a festive affair.
"It's a party," Valdivia said. "Families get together to cut the rosca, to drink hot chocolate and coffee."
Dec. 25 has come and gone, but Christmastime isn't over just yet, not for the contingent of Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and many others around Utah and beyond, anyway. Dia de los Reyes, Jan. 6 each year, marks the day the three wise men first visited Jesus, bringing the newborn baby gifts. Many will be celebrating the occasion, carrying on the tradition that's common in Mexico and many other places.
It's a religious occasion with deep roots among Catholics in Mexico, "but it is also very much a cultural holiday," said Melissa Seron Richardson, a Sandy writer who authored a children's book focused on the day, "The Last Slice: A Three Kings Day Treat."
"People celebrate it even if they're not Catholic," Richardson said.
As a child growing up in California, she remembers going to her aunt's home on Día de los Reyes when rosca de reyes would be served. She was a bit leery of eating it back then because of the small plastic figures representing the baby Jesus baked inside the sweet bread, which is topped with candied fruit. She worried she might accidentally eat one.
"I could not imagine anything more horrible than swallowing a baby Jesus," she recalled.
Whoever ends up with a Jesus figurine is supposed to buy tamales to help celebrate Día de la Candelaria, Candlemas in English, on Feb. 2, another celebration rooted in the Catholic church.
Día de los Reyes was always a festive occasion, Richardson said, and the bread — she finally discovered — tasted good. Those childhood memories are what inspired her book, released just last month.
"As a child, I just wanted to see my cousins, and there was going to be food, and I loved eating rosca. ... It was just a very warm environment," she said.
Just as Reyes and Valdivia have been busy baking rosca de reyes, Richardson has been busy with readings of her book, most recently at a West Valley school and on Thursday at Viridian West Jordan Library. She'll do a reading on Saturday at the King's English Bookshop in Sugar House.
"It is really a growing celebration," she said, with incarnations in Puerto Rico, France, even New Orleans. It's also celebrated in Central and South America and around Europe.
Indeed, if you're Mexican or of Mexican descent, she maintains, you either celebrate it "or you're just kind of lazy and you choose not to, but it's not because you don't know about it." Richardson's father is of Mexican descent, she said, while her mother is white.
The Centro Cívico Mexicano, a Mexican cultural center in Salt Lake City, will be hosting a Three Kings Day event on Saturday, free to the public. It goes from 5-9 p.m. at 155 S. 600 West, the civic center headquarters. Three people dressed as the wise men will give kids a present — gifts are another Día de los Reyes tradition — and there will be rosca de reyes and more.
Like Richardson and Reyes, Arsenio Gonzalez, the civic center director, said the occasion is both a religious and cultural event. Also like them, he said it's a big deal in Mexico.
"There's a public event in every city. Some are bigger, some are smaller, but every city has one," said Gonzalez, originally from Puebla, Mexico.
Reyes, originally from Aguascalientes, Mexico, and Valdivia, originally from Puebla, will keep busy through the end of the week baking rosca de reyes, probably around 300 of them in all. Richardson, too, is readying for the day and has already reached out to a friend who bakes rosca de reyes.
"We've got ours ordered and we'll be celebrating," she said.
