A trip to Fiesta is always entertaining. There’s just so much weird stuff there. On our most recent expedition, Gwen and I noticed a large display of various luck candles. Some with images of saints, some with images of Pancho Villa or other unidentifiable secular figures, but most explicitly promising some kind of specific effect, like JOB. I noticed one that read
ALLEGED SPELL BREAK
Leaving aside snarky observations of the ambiguous reference–is it the spell that is alleged, or the breaking of it–you’ve got to laugh at the legalistic ass-covering implied by that weasel-word. Seriously: is someone going to burn the candle and then sue the maker because whatever spell it was supposed to break had not been broken? I guess stranger things have happened.
When we got to the checkout line, we were behind a couple of young women buying some of these candles (along with various good-luck oils), apparently in earnest.
LOL.
It would never occur to me that they had a website.
My sister Monica bought a home in Oak Cliff years ago. At the time, Oak Cliff was (and mostly likely still is) one of the most diverse areas of Dallas. As a joke, a friend bought her a bottle of “good luck floor wash” they had found in one of the Latino botanical shops in the area. Who knew such a thing existed? It was a milky pink liquid in a small bottle like the kind you get vanilla extract in. She kept the bottle on the kitchen window sill and pretty much forgot about it.
Several years later, she hired a maid to clean her house once a month. First thing the maid did was mop all of Monica’s floors with the good luck potion! She was a Latina woman who must have figured Monica had left it out for that very purpose.
There’s a part of me that finds the marketing of idiotic superstition irritating, and another part of me that finds the concept of “lucky floor wash” too amusing.
I love Fiesta. In fact, until we moved last week, it was our regular grocery store. Mainly because it was the closest to where we lived downtown, but also because they tend to have cheap prices, and a lot of Mexican ingredients not found in the more whitebread stores.
Fiesta is fun. It’s especially good here in Dallas because we don’t have H.E.B. like in Austin to but Mexican groceries at. I love freaking out my wife by showing her the stuff like the whole hog’s heads (used for traditional tamales.)
Some believe that a long-standing feud or argument – or a loved one becoming argumentative and disagreeable, can be the result of a spell cast for that purpose. The Spanish alegado can translate to either “alleged” or the past participle for “argument.” So it could be a translation problem – and I imagine the candle is supposed to actually be for breaking one of these “argument” spells.
Charles–
Thanks for chiming in. I especially like the explanation of “alleged”, being a language nerd, but the thing is, lots of the luck candles have these, including the “alleged good luck” candle, etc. “argument” just wouldn’t work.