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Learn about one of the most time-honored and traditional holiday meals in Costa Rica, Christmas tamales.

One of the most common dishes in Latin American gastronomy is a dough filled with various ingredients and wrapped in leaves, usually banana or plantain leaves. But what you call that dish depends on your country of origin—or your family’s.

Specifically, in Mexico they’re called tamales; in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, pasteles; in Venezuela, hallacas; in Nicaragua, nacatamales; in Bolivia, humintas; in Guatemala, chuchitos; and in Brazil, pamonhas.

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These dishes are not only part of each country’s local culinary variety. In some places, they’re considered national s

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