Poinsettia

The Aztecs called it cuetlaxochitl — 'flower that wilts.' They used its red bracts to make a crimson dye and its milky sap as a fever remedy. The plant grew wild in the tropical forests of southern Mexico and Central America. It had no association with Christmas. It was a practical plant in a tropical civilization, valued for its color and its chemistry.

Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, encountered the plant in Taxco in 1828. Poinsett was an amateur botanist and a politician from South Carolina. He sent cuttings to his greenhouse in Charleston and to botanical gardens across the United States. The plant was formally described and named Poinsettia pulcherrima in his honor in 1836 (later reclassified as Euphorbia pulcherrima). The name stuck.

The Christmas association was manufactured. Paul Ecke Sr. and his family, German immigrants in Los Angeles, began selling potted poinsettias from roadside stands in the 1920s. Paul Ecke Jr. expanded the business in the 1960s by sending free plants to television stations during the holiday season. By the 1980s, the Ecke family controlled 90% of the American wholesale poinsettia market. A marketing campaign turned a Mexican plant into a Christmas decoration.

Poinsett himself was a controversial figure. He meddled extensively in Mexican politics during his ambassadorship, to the point that 'poinsettismo' became a Mexican term for unwanted foreign interference. The Aztec flower carries the name of a man Mexico remembers as an imperialist. Cuetlaxochitl carries no such baggage, but nobody uses it.