One evening, Pablo was spilling his usual sawdust down at the Bark ‘n Barley to Mimosa.  She’d mentioned Poco Loco was in earlier, very excited about a Mexican holiday coming up on the fifth of May.  She thought it would be nice to have a little surprise for Poco at the bar, but didn’t know anything about the festivities.

So she asked Pablo about it, because she thought Pablo was very smart and knew everything.

Well, Pablo told her the holiday was called Hold da Mayo and many people mistakenly believed it was a celebration of the Mexican independence day.  He said he thought people got confused because if you add two months to May and subtract one day from the fifth, you come up with July fourth, which of course is the American independence day.

“But,” he continued, “it really isn’t the Mexican independence day since they had won their independence from Spain a decade earlier.”  He said it was more like a boycott of a foreign power, almost like the Boston Tea Party.

“It’s a little known fact,” he continued authoritativly, “that Mexicans have always put Mayonnaise in their tacos for hundreds of years.  “And,” he said, “they always bought the Mayo from the French, who stole credit for inventing it from Al Gore’s Great Great Grandparents.”

But the French kept voting to impose greater and greater taxes on the mayonnaise they exported to the Mexicans, to the point where poor families could barely afford to put it on the their little nino’s tacos.

This made the Mexicans mad, but what made them even madder was they had no say in the vote.  There were loud grumblings by political scientist about mayonation, the act of taxing mayonnaise without representation (I know, I know, it’s French, what can I say).

So, the Mexicans refused to pay any more taxes on the mayonnaise, and in fact, shipped it all to Boston to be thrown in the harbor.  The Americans, already checked out in this procedure, were more than happy to oblige their southern amigos.

When the French leader Napoleon III heard this, he was very teed off and said things like, “Mon deux, what is the world coming to!!!” which litterally translated meant, “My God, what is the world coming to!!!”

He also kept muttering,”Sacre Bleu!!!” which sounds really French but we don’t understand why he kept saying it because it means blue pig.

Having thrown his little Napoleonic tantrum, he sent four thousand of his crack troops (yes, there were drug problems in the military back then) to go beat up the Mexicans, make them pay their taxes, and stop buying a new American product called Miracle Whip, which was being substituted by the Mexicans and wreaking havoc on the price of mayonaise futures in the French commodities market.

Well, the French invaded Mexico, and marched on the little town of Pueblo, which litterly translated means, little town.  As the battle ensued with the French charging from one end of town and the Mexicans from the other, Generalisimo Zaragosa knew he needed to rally his troops so he shouted, “Whup those blue pigs arses!!!”

But this confused his troops, who kept looking around for a pigs arse, but could only see the French soldiers.  Finally in desperation, he shouted “Hold da Mayo!!”  This the troops understood, since it was what the battle was all about.  So they all rallied and shouted, “Hold da Mayo” and a few other unprintable things, beat the French up and won the battle.

From that day forward, no patriotic Mexican would ever put mayo in his tacos again.  The Mexicans always remembered how the Americans had helped them by dumping all the mayo in Boston harbor, even though it still hadn’t been cleaned up one hundred and fifty years later.

And President Jackson, representing the American admiration for their southern brothers and for a really good fight, said in his state of the union address, “Man, those Mexicans can really kick arse!!!” which confused many Americans who never understand foreign words, but they got the gist of the story and cheered anyway.

“And so,” Pablo concluded, “this is why the Mexicans celebrate their independence from mayonaise.”

“Besides,” he said, “it’s another good excuse for a fiesta.”

And that, my amigos, is about the only part of the story he got right.