If you find yourself in a Christmas chariot this week, perhaps a pair of Broncos will be carrying it.

Denver inside linebacker Alex Singleton and kicker Wil Lutz looked like pros over the weekend at the Colorado Ballet’s performance of “The Nutcracker.”

The duo made brief appearances in the ballet’s rendition of the Christmas classic on Sunday night at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House downtown.

They carried out a chariot with a ballet dancer inside at the start of the Arabian Dance. Then they stood on the stage and posed for a minute before their appearance was finished.

It lasted, Singleton told The Denver Post, maybe two minutes.

And it was nerve-wracking.

“Oh yeah,” Singleton said on Tuesday. “I didn’t know what to do. But it was kind of funny, we just stood there.”

The whole thing came about because the Broncos and the Colorado Ballet each have Dr. James Genuario on their medical staff.

That helped clear the path for Singleton, who is on injured reserve after tearing his ACL in September, to participate.

“That was my first question: Can I do it? And he was like, ‘Yeah, you’ll be fine,’” Singleton said. “I mean, I think the dancer weighed about 80 pounds and the carriage weighed about 10. So I carry more than that every day, which is nice.”

Range of motion is no problem exactly 10 weeks post-operation for Singleton.

“I got to 152 degrees,” he said. “Regular life is normal.”

Performing in a ballet, though, is hardly normal life. Singleton and Lutz had exactly zero advanced prep work for their big debut.

“I think it started at 6:30, we showed up about 6,” Singleton said. “At intermission, before we did it, they showed us how to do it and that was it. We just had to make sure the costumes fit us. … But it was really cool. We got to watch from backstage, meet all the people. It was really cool to see how it all runs and everything.”

Did you see Will Lutz and Alex Singleton in the Nutcracker with the @ColoradoBallet?🎄#BroncosCountry | @gs_off_field pic.twitter.com/Lon7TMqNj1

— Guerilla Sports (@guerillasports_) December 24, 2024

Singleton said he was not particularly familiar with “The Nutcracker,” Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet.

“I still don’t know the story,” he said. “We asked a couple of the dancers and they were explaining it to us. So I kind of know that it’s like a dream for the little girl where the Nutcracker comes alive, but that’s about it.”

Singleton, of course, was Denver’s leading tackler the past two years, a captain this fall and was calling Denver’s defense before tearing his ACL in Week 3 at Tampa Bay. The injury happened early in the game, but Singleton played the rest of the game with it before being told the severity of the injury that evening. He had ACL surgery on Oct. 15 in Los Angeles and then returned to spend time around the team and rehabilitate here.

Lutz has been a model of consistency in his second year kicking for the Broncos. Three days before appearing in the show he knocked home a pair of field goals against Los Angeles, including a season-long 55-yarder.

Lutz is now 29 of 32 for field goals on the season. The only kick of less than 50 yards he’s missed was a game-sealing block by Kansas City in Week 10. Lutz has also made all 38 extra points on the year.

His 90.6% field goal rate is sixth in the NFL among kickers with more than 20 field goal attempts.

On the Colorado Ballet’s social media channels, Singleton gave himself a 7 out of 10 and Lutz an 8 of 10, with the kicker saying he was proud that he didn’t blink once.

In the locker room, at least one teammate was skeptical.

“Oh my god, I had no idea what was going on,” tight end Adam Trautman told The Post. “All they did was pick something up. Now, if they’d have danced or something, that would have been elite. But no chance they can move like that.”

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DENVER — Christmas just isn’t Christmas without the festive foods we grew up with, and for many Mexican Americans in Colorado, that means a steaming pot of pozole.

“These are the foods that I grew up craving,” said Chef Jose Avila Vilchez, who runs La Diabla Pozole y Mezcal in Denver’s Ballpark District.

Chef Vilchez grew up eating pozole in Mexico City. Every Thursday, he went with his mom and brother to enjoy two-for-one specials on the traditional soup.

But when he moved to Denver more than a decade ago, the pozolerias of his childhood were nowhere to be found.

“Red posole is a thing. So, in 100% of the Mexican restaurants here, that’s what you would find, a red pozole, but it was more for as a filler than as a main dish,” he said.

So, he opened La Diabla to serve up flavors many Coloradans haven’t tasted before.

While red pozole is a still a favorite, Chef Vilchez also studied recipes from across Mexico to make green, white and even black pozole.

“Our pozole negro, it’s a unique thing. That’s something that we invented,” said Chef Vilchez, who drew inspiration from a mole recipe popular in Yucatan. The black color comes from chilmole paste and charred rocoto chiles.

StarChefs

“The flavor is just amazing, even just the broth,” he said.

But even with these innovative and varied broths, at the heart of each dish is pozole’s ancient history.

“Pozole is a ceremonial dish,” Chef Vilchez said.

The Aztecs prepared pozole from corn — which they considered sacred — and human flesh sacrificed in religious ceremonies. After Spanish colonizers came to the Americas, the Mexica people stopped practicing cannibalism and replaced the meat in pozole with pigs and chickens.

Florentine Codex

As the pot boiled, the foam bubbling to the top gave the dish its name – the Nahuatl word for foam is “pozolli.”

“Even though we lost a lot of dishes that they used to make back in the day, the Mexica’s pozole still is like… a celebration,” Chef Vilchez said.

Hundreds of years later, the star ingredient in pozole remains the same: Corn. And Chef Vilchez uses the traditional process of nixtamalization to soften the kernels.

He sources high-quality corn and puts it in a pot of boiling water and cal (calcium hydroxide), which creates an alkaline solution that partially dissolves the corn’s hard skin and transforms the corn’s taste and texture.

Adam Hillberry, Denver7

“Once you have, like a mother pozole, per se, like a white broth, then you can add the salsa,” Chef Vilchez said.

He also adds in vegetables like thinly sliced radishes, cabbage, onion and lettuce, as well as meat like chicken or pork.

While Chef Vilchez serves pozole year-round, many people associate it with holidays.

In Mexico City, he grew up eating pozole on Mexican Independence Day, “especially if you have the red, the white and the green, just like the Mexican flag,” he said.

But here in Colorado, and in much of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, pozole is most popular around Christmastime.

As a homemade family meal, “you make the pozole, and that pot stays in the kitchen. It never leaves. You make it there. You let it do its thing, and once it’s ready, you start serving from the pot,” Chef Vilchez said.

For Cristóbal Garcia — who was born in Valparaíso, Zacatecas, and then grew up in Colorado where his mother’s family has lived for eleven generations — pozole is very much tied to Christmas.

“During the holidays leading up to Nochebuena, or what we know here as Christmas Eve,” Garcia said his family celebrated Las Posadas with pozole and tamales.

“It’s about connecting with your family, connecting with your friends, connecting with your neighbors,” he said.

Since his father immigrated from central Mexico, his mother grew up in Colorado and his wife’s family is from coastal Sinaloa and northern Chihuahua, he’s enjoyed tasting many different recipes for pozole.

“My mother-in-law makes it with a green chile base, and she makes it with chicken sometimes instead of with pork,” he said.

While his sisters cook their Abuelita’s recipe for red pozole passed down for generations, and now shared with you in the recipe below:

For Garcia, who directs the Metropolitan State University of Denver’s First-Generation Initiatives, celebrating with these traditional foods is a chance for Coloradans to reflect on culture, identity and the state’s history.

“Sometimes people say, ‘ni de aquí, ni de allá‘ [not from here nor from there]. And I say, ‘soy de aquí y de allá‘ [I’m from here and from there],” he said.

Whether you cook your own pozole or savor a bowl from a restaurant like La Diabla, both Garcia and Chef Vilchez hope Coloradans will spend time communing over a flavorful meal.

Chef Vilchez said he’s been “blessed and super humbled” to receive awards like the James Beard and the Michelin Guide’s Bib Gourmand awards. But it means even more to him when customers say the food brings back warm memories of meals shared with their families.

“When you touch someone’s soul like that… it’s just a different connection on a personal level,” he said.