Tamale Time

Part of my holiday tradition for Christmas is to round up the family and any other volunteers, and make a large amount of tamales.  We've been doing this as long as I can remember and my mother has done it as long as she can remember, so it's a very long standing ritual for us.  In fact, it wouldn't be Christmas without it.
We start early in the morning and go buy some prepared masa (this is the ground corn you need to hold the meat in).  Making it yourself is way too time consuming and hard work so we take the easy way out.  A day or two before we make tamales, we've slow roasted many pounds of meat down to the point where it's falling apart and then you take out the fat, bone, and any other nasties you find and shred it down with your hands.  After that's done you have to add the sauce and some salt and pepper to taste.
Then there's ohas, papel, and olives to get out and add to the mix.
Black olives are easy, all you need to do is take them out of the can and leave them in their own juice.
Papel needs to be wet before you can wrap finished uncooked tamales in them.
Ohas is the Spanish word for corn husk.  These need to be cleaned out.  They will contain bugs, and hair, and you DO NOT want to skip this step.  They need to be soaked in warm water so they get soft and pliable.
We work in an assembly line style along with listening to holiday music and a lot of talking and joking are going on.
It's really a lot of work, but if you have enough people, it goes somewhat fast.
This year, we made 13 dozen.  We won't eat all of those ourselves of course.  We give some away and make sure we have enough for Christmas day, after that, they go when they go.
Plus there's a few variations of tamales....some that I've heard of or tried are:
green corn tamales (green chiles, corn, without meat) Yummie.
green cheese tamales (green chiles with cheese, and no meat) Also yummie.
sweet tamales (these have things like raisins or other dried fruit) blech.
but my favorite are the kind we make....red tamales!!!!
So if you ever wondered what makes them so expensive to buy, you know that
they take a lot of labor to make as well as cost of production.  We spent about $150.00 this year to make them.