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Annual pillow-fights!

Aztec/Mexica youngsters played childish games just like we do! During one day of the 17th month (‘Tititl’) in the solar/farming calendar, Book 2 of the Florentine Codex records that Aztec boys engaged in the equivalent of our pillow-fights against girls... (Written/compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

‘[On the day after the religious festival] all the common folk made a number of sacks, like pockets, with some cords attached, as much as a fathom long. They filled those sacks with soft things, like wool, and they carried them hidden under their capes, and they struck, with the bags, all the women whom they might meet in the streets...’

The ‘pillows’ also took the form of grass nets filled with flowers or scraps of paper, flower-filled ‘gloves’ locally called hand bags, or in some cases simply green maize leaves rolled and pressed into balls.

Girls, of course, usually went about their affairs not only well aware of the risk of having a bag thrown at them but prepared to defend themselves by carrying a cactus thorn in their clothes and chasing the boys in return, brandishing the sharp thorn at them!

Info from Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Book 2 - The Ceremonies, translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, School of American Research and University of Utah, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1981. 
3 At 1.30pm on Friday November 16 2012, alexis highsmith wrote:

i love pillow fights!!

2 At 3.52pm on Friday August 12 2011, Katia of Tonkam wrote:

I remember a similar traditional Easter game in Texas of “cascarones”, in which kids smash egg shells filled with confetti on each others’ heads. This a Hispanic tradition, so it probably is Aztec in origin.

1 At 3.47pm on Monday March 22 2010, tecpaocelotl wrote:

This reminds me of this one game my family do during Easter. We have empty eggs that we fill with confetti and we sneak behind someone just so we smash it on their head.

I’m not sure if it has European or Mexican origin.