red and green make for a striking combo
Growing up in New Mexico, when someone says “red or green,” you automatically think chile peppers. (More on this in just a bit!) But I did learn to associate these colors with Christmas too, of course. And later, I even found out that they’re complementary colors, which is why red and green make such a great combination! Here, red and green look striking in the fleur-de-lis above. And given how good it looks, I’d expect to try this combo more often with future ice art.
how red and green became Christmas colors
It seems, as it does for many things Christmas (American at least), that Coca-Cola is at least partly to blame for how we associate red and green with Christmas. Just as they established the modern version of Santa, they influenced the main color combo with their ads as well. But it appears that holly, with its green leaves and red berries, also plays a part. The sharp leaves and the blood red berries remind one of Christ’s thorny crown. In fact, now that I know that about holly, I doubt I’ll ever forget it.
what red and green means in New Mexico
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, I didn’t grow up in New Orleans. Instead, I spent my formative years in Albuquerque and I started learning to sculpt ice there as well. Only once I decided I was ready for a change of scenery did I move to Nola.
At some point, I realized that growing up in New Mexico usually means that you’re quietly indoctrinated into a church of chile. And members of that congregation will struggle with their addiction to chile for most of their lives thereafter 
Happily, much of the rest of the country hasn’t wised up to the dangers of this addiction. As such, now even in New Orleans it’s possible to walk into a Whole Foods and find a Hatch green chile display, at least in September. (If you don’t know what I mean by Hatch, it’s a little town in southern NM that’s the mecca of green chile.)
the official question: red or green?
If you find this confusing, you have to understand that New Mexico’s regional food is deeply intertwined with the chile pepper. Just as the Texas state pepper is the jalapeño, the New Mexico state pepper is the green chile. New Mexico though, takes it a step further, and the official state question is “red or green?” And the question is asking if you want red chile or green chile on your dish. Although it seems to be a California point of view (blasphemy! 
), here’s an explanation of the difference.
I distinctly remember my first out-of-New Mexico experience with chile. Almost inexplicably at the time, I’d decided to attend college in San Antonio, Texas. The inexplicable part comes in when you realize that, despite the proximity, New Mexicans and Texans are not even remotely alike. Especially on the NM ski slopes, my friends and I had a particular disdain for Texans. The stereotypical Texan skier, at least from my youth, was obnoxious, wore jeans and a cowboy hat on the slopes, and couldn’t ski to save his life.
Ok, sorry, crappy Texan skiers distracted me! Back to the chile part…
chile is with an “e” not an “i”
At least in my memory, somehow I was in a car, although I didn’t have a car when I first got to college. (The rambling wreck that I drove later was a couple of years away, although the motorcycle would arrive soon.) But however I got there, I was in a Wendy’s drive-through and I asked if I could get green chile with my cheeseburger.
Up to that point, I wouldn’t have thought that disgust traveled well through a drive-through speaker system. But that’s clearly what I heard when the Wendy’s employee apparently thought that I meant green Texas chili. Which I would have to agree, sounds pretty gross! Think moldy Wendy’s chili, maybe? 
I’m sure I tried to explain, but it was no use. Although green chile is widely available at all sorts of restaurants in NM (even McDonald’s often has it), it’s not really a thing elsewhere. Alas, I resigned myself to 4 1/2 years of college with only holiday and summertime opportunities to have green chile cheeseburgers. I survived, but it was rough!
(If I later decide to revisit my chile addiction, I’m sure I’ll detail my quest for the perfect green chile cheese-non-burger. But that’s a story for another time…)
wait, what?
OK, so this post has gone completely off the rails 
See what happens when a chile addict starts thinking, hmmm, red or green?
Apparently, what I’m going to do is just populate this post with pictures of red and green ice art. I suspect I’ll have to work a bit to tie it all in with New Orleans more. And although I have a few red and green ice sculpture pics above, I don’t have much in the way of red and green fine ice art yet, so you’ll have to bear with me. But eventually, they’ll go perfectly with my disconnected recollections about red and green chile, lol
And damn it! Now I’m hungry, and you might have noticed that I haven’t technically answered the “official” question for myself: red or green? But I kinda did answer it: red and green make a great combination 😉
So both!
a final note on this post
I’ve expanded this post quite a bit and last updated it 9/22/20. To be brutally honest, my first few posts on this blog, including this one, were throwaway posts, mostly concerned with the front page gallery and slider. The theme that I used initially had an odd set up where it needed images from sticky posts (sticky as in where they “stick” in the blog, not as in sticky gross) to run the slider where the welcome images rotated. That meant the posts really didn’t need many words. The front page gallery worked the same way, so, weird. Fortunately, I’ve now adopted a different theme for the site.
However, rather than toss these early posts, I’ve decided to just rework them. I guess that’s my explanation as to why a few of my blog posts are a little…off topic. Also, going down a rabbit hole doesn’t just happen to readers. It happens to writers too 😉
