D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December 2009
| Editor's note: We're pleased to present again, by popular demand, this holiday piece that originally ran in our December 2004 issue — before our current website and before many of today's readers discovered Desert Exposure. When "Waiting for the Light" first appeared, it was singled out by Robert Atwan, editor of the annual Best American Essays collection, as one of the "Notable Essays of 2004," along with essays from publications such asThe New Yorker, GQ, The American Scholar and Vanity Fair. |
Waiting for the Light
New Mexico celebrates the season by lighting luminarias and farolitos. How did a humble candle in a paper bag come to be a beacon of hope in a darkling world?
By David A. Fryxell
Christmas came for my childhood as a light at the end of a long, dark hallway. Swaddled in Montgomery Ward pajamas and a terrycloth bathrobe, electric with anticipation, I'd wait for my parents to plug in the Christmas-tree lights and sound the all-clear for me to come see what Santa brought. More than the presents themselves — the half-remembered tin Western town, the chemistry sets, the plastic microscope, the ersatz weaponry, the Visible Man with his removable innards — it was the waiting for the light, excitement like a balloon in my stomach, that was the beating heart of Christmas for me. It still is.
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I would have already been waiting for the appointed hour for long minutes in my bed, expectation awakening me well before the earliest time my parents had set for Christmas morning to begin. I'd watch the slow, buzzing cascade of the numerals on my clock radio, counting down to Christmas. As the last zero began to fall, signaling the arrival of the hour, I'd kick off the covers and scramble out of bed to wake up my parents. And then, while they took much too long in the bathroom, then plugged in the coffeepot and the tree lights, I would wait in the dark hallway, the carpet tickling my bare feet and the muffled, mundane sounds of morning suddenly sanctified.
But when the glow and my father's grumble finally announced that the wait was over, I wouldn't run down the hall toward my presents. Savoring these seconds in which potentiality transformed into actuality, I would measure my steps. Past the dark bathroom, still hissing wetly. Past the closed basement door. Onto the cold linoleum of the entryway, then turning until the tree-glow lit my face and cast my cowlicked shadow onto the front door behind me.
If I could capture Christmas like a scene frozen in a snowglobe, or like a television program put on "pause," I would stop right then. Just before the revelation. No geegaws actually under the tree could be as wonderful, once seen, as the supernal glow of Christmas morning itself, the light of two thousand years reflected in a boy's eyes on a snowy South Dakota dawn.
For the people of 16th-century New Mexico, the essence of Christmas was the light of a bonfire. They would light stacks of ocote, pitch-wood sticks, set four-by-four like little log cabins along the roads and in the churchyards — luminarias. Sometimes they built bonfires right on the flat roofs of their adobe houses. Later, in the early 19th century, Anglo settlers imported Chinese paper lanterns, which they would hang from their doorways instead of building bonfires. These fancy substitutes were too expensive for most New Mexicans to emulate, so they crafted their own small lanterns from plain paper sacks, lit inwardly by a votive candle and anchored by a cupful of sand — farolitos.
Today, as the paper-bag lanterns and their less-incendiary, arguably more reliable stand-ins of plastic lit by electricity have spread across America, the term luminaria — from the plural of the Latin word for "lamp" — has stuck. Few of us build bonfires in our driveways any more; the neighbors would probably call the fire department. Here in New Mexico, the paper-bag lanterns are typically called luminarias in Albuquerque, as in the rest of America, but people in Santa Fe, I'm told, still tend to call them farolitos, Spanish for "little lights."
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language offers this "Regional Note": "In recent years it has become commonplace to see entire American neighborhoods decorated during holiday season with luminarias lining driveways, sidewalks or rooftops. A luminaria is a votive candle set inside a small decorative paper bag weighted with sand. The bags are usually colored and often perforated with designs through which the candle inside shows as pinpricks of light." The custom, the dictionary goes on, comes from Mexico and was long established in New Mexico before spreading to the rest of the United States. The Pueblo peoples here, it also notes, had a holiday custom of building bonfires called luminarias outside each house.
Before Christmas was shanghaied by the Grinch and the shopping mall, these bonfires served a holy purpose. They lit Las Posadas — from the Spanish for "lodging" or "inn" — the symbolic re-enactment of Mary and Joseph's search for room at the inn in Bethlehem. Originally, in those days before "Frosty the Snowman" reruns on TV, groups of carolers would progress from house to house, singing a plea for food and shelter at each, much like the Dickensian carolers' demand, half a world away, to "bring us some figgy pudding." Las Posadas began on Dec. 16 and continued for nine consecutive nights, until the climax on Christmas Eve, when the luminarias lit the way instead to midnight Mass.
Cleofas M. Jaramillo (1878-1956), founder of the Folkloric Society of Santa Fe, sought to preserve these traditions, as well as the state's culinary heritage, in books such as Shadows of the Past (Sombras del Pasado), which she wrote in 1941. She introduced the section on "Noche Buena and Religious Dramas" with these lines:
"Let the luminarias leap high
As the night grows long,
And the shadows dance
To the caroler's song."
Jaramillo recalled the traditional scene on Christmas Eve from her childhood in New Mexico: "The snow lay heavily on the deep valley, half burying the silent little villages nestling among the white hills. As the last rays of the setting sun turned the highest snow-capped peaks into gold and rose, the men and boys of the three villages busied themselves clearing the snow from the front yards in every house. They were preparing the ground for the luminarias. . . . As the deepening shadows of night spread over the valley, the brown adobe houses were brightened with the red glow of their fire, which warmed the groups of men and boys standing around them. The fires built in front of my house were kept burning brightly until midnight by the occasional addition of an empty kerosene barrel, which had been saved in the store for that purpose."
Inside the house, as Jaramillo remembered it, children would be warming the piones and shelling them by rubbing the nuts between two boards. The pine nuts would then go into the mince meat for sweet holiday empanaditas, little fried pies. "An extra hired woman beat the white corn dough until it was so light that a small piece dropped into a cup of water floated on top. It was then ready for the tamales, which were made and steamed, to be served with hot coffee after the midnight chapel services."
The empanaditas would feed the Oremos boys, carolers who came to the kitchen door singing:
"Oration. Oration.
From heaven we come.
Angels we are,
If you won't give us gifts,
Alas, we won't return.
From the housekeepers,
New Year's gifts we ask.
With great joy,
With great contentment,
Let's celebrate this birth.
For the night is long.
And we have lots to walk."
The boys would eat their treats around the bonfires, then take their song to the next house.
In the earliest version of Las Posadas, according to Jaramillo, when the processions would last for nine days, a couple representing Mary and Joseph, trailed by groups of children, went to nine houses in the village. "Joseph" would knock at the door of each house and sing:
"Who will give lodging
To these travelers
Who come weary
From traveling long roads?"
But each time the reply would come:
"Who bangs at the door?
The imprudent makes a commotion,
Without noticing that it's late,
And the household he awakes."
The persistent Joseph would plead:
"O Lord, I implore Thee,
That in Thy mercy
Thou wilt give shelter to this damsel."
At all except the ninth house, however, they would be turned away by the voice within, portraying a sort of Red Roof Inn precursor:
"For him who has money,
My house is ready."
At the ninth house, however, the group would be admitted and feted with refreshments. A villager playing a hermit would hold up a cross at the door to keep el diablo at bay. But when the "hermit" was distracted by the holiday treats, the devil would sneak in anyway: "Satan played his pranks, helped himself to anything he liked, rattled his long nails, wrote in his book the names of the girls and women who smiled at him when he asked them if they wanted to come with him."