The Poinsettia Is a Christmas Flower Burdened With a Bad Name

Bonnie Jean Feldkamp
Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:00:00 -0800
Opinion

When visiting San Antonio with my family, I came prepared. If we were going to take our son to see the Alamo, I wanted to make sure he learned the whole history. I did not want him believing a caricature of U.S. history that only served to enshrine so-called white heroes. Especially since my husband is Tejano. Our son is a complicated mix of anglo and tejano lineage. He deserves to understand exactly how that came to be. It turns out there's a Christmas flower that perfectly encapsulates this complicated history. The Poinsettia has changed hands along with identities over the years, and it's time we rethink its name.

In preparation for our trip, I had read the 2021 bestseller "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth" written by three Texans: Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford. While reading the book, a simple footnote caught my eye. The book dedicates only two paragraphs to Joel Robert Poinsett for his role in Texas history. In 1825, he was sent as the first U.S. minister to Mexico with the authority to purchase Texas from Mexico for $1 million. Mexico was not interested in selling. Poinsett was also integral in gathering intelligence needed to write the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers against further colonization.

However, Poinsett was also a botanist. This leads me to the footnote that piqued my interest, and you've probably already guessed. Poinsett brought back to the United States the beautiful Mexican flower that we commonly call the Poinsettia.
Updated: Fri Dec 12, 2025

When visiting San Antonio with my family, I came prepared. If we were going to take our son to see the Alamo, I wanted to make sure he learned the whole history. I did not want him believing a caricature of U.S. history that only served to enshrine so-called white heroes. Especially since my husband is Tejano. Our son is a complicated mix of anglo and tejano lineage. He deserves to understand exactly how that came to be. It turns out there's a Christmas flower that perfectly encapsulates this complicated history. The Poinsettia has changed hands along with identities over the years, and it's time we rethink its name.

In preparation for our trip, I had read the 2021 bestseller "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth" written by three Texans: Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford. While reading the book, a simple footnote caught my eye. The book dedicates only two paragraphs to Joel Robert Poinsett for his role in Texas history. In 1825, he was sent as the first U.S. minister to Mexico with the authority to purchase Texas from Mexico for $1 million. Mexico was not interested in selling. Poinsett was also integral in gathering intelligence needed to write the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers against further colonization.

However, Poinsett was also a botanist. This leads me to the footnote that piqued my interest, and you've probably already guessed. Poinsett brought back to the United States the beautiful Mexican flower that we commonly call the Poinsettia.

The story sounds benign enough on the surface, but on closer look, the reality of Poinsett is gruesome. Reading the research of Miami University history professor Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Poinsett's attachment to this favorite winter flower brings no Christmas cheer.

Poinsett was a deep-seated racist. He enslaved nearly 100 people on a rice plantation in South Carolina. He supported a coup in Mexico City in 1829, and he also went on to be Andrew Jackson's secretary of war. Poinsett oversaw the execution of Jackson's 1830 Indian Removal Act, also known as the Trail of Tears, where the government forced migration of Native people in 1838-1839 across land and water routes through nine states. It devastatingly displaced members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations. More than 10,000 Native Americans died as they were moved from their homelands in the South to reservations in the West.

Poinsett's name should not be synonymous with the flower we associate with the holidays.

When missionaries spread the Catholic faith through Indigenous communities in the 1600s, it was the timing of the bloom that first connected the plant to Christmas. Franciscan friars used them to decorate nativity scenes. The legend goes that a young poor girl named Pepita collected the flowers along the roadside on the way to church on Christmas Eve. She wanted a gift to offer baby Jesus. This is why the flower is known as la flor de Nochebuena in Mexico, which literally translates to "the Christmas Eve flower."

If you go back further in the flower's history, you'll find that Native people of Central and South America called the flower cuetlaxochitl (kwet-la-sho-she). The Aztecs used cuetlaxochitl as decoration and to produce red and purple dyes. They also used the sap for medicinal purposes. The Mayans called the flower k'alul wits (kah-LOOL weets), and its medicinal uses are still practiced today among the Teenek people of southeastern Mexico.

Each culture named the flower to signify what it meant to them — until Poinsett found it and sent it to horticulturists in America. Nurseries began to sell the flower in the late 1830s. It became known as the Poinsettia for Joel Roberts Poinsett. It was not the only plant the botanist brought to the U.S., and Poinsett even played a role in founding the organization that led to the creation of the Smithsonian Institution.

Still, the flower named for Poinsett deserves a better one, one that aligns with the spirit of the season and can honor its native roots. If you truly wish to celebrate the generosity of Christmas and the love embedded in the story of Jesus' birth, a flower named for a racist who supported ethnic cleansing and slavery is not the way to do it.

This Poinsettia is planted along the San Antonio Riverwalk. Photo Credit: Bonnie Jean Feldkamp