D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December 2009
Luminaria
Page: 4
Not to be outdone, the Do It Yourself (DIY) cable-TV channel offers step-by-step instructions for "Papyrus-Wrapped Luminaria." Here, the candle is set inside a glass vase — no more fear of the paper bag bursting into flame — that is wrapped in papyrus or handmade paper. Ben Franklin's Almanac of Wit, Wisdom and Practical Advice: Useful Tips and Fascinating Facts for Every Day of the Year — from Yankee Books and the Old Farmer's Almanac, not actually written by the founding father and electricity pioneer — suggests using large metal juice cans to create reusable luminarias. Use a nail or hole puncher to make holes in the sides of the cans ("If you're handy, you can punch out designs such as hearts or stars"). Paint the cans with flat black paint, then pour two inches of sand into the bottom as a base for the candle. Traditional luminarias using paper bags, the book notes, "require a bit more vigilance and are best used when there is snow on the ground."
If all this sounds too complicated, don't despair. Holiday Decorating for Dummies has 25 references to luminarias. These range from simple paper-bag lanterns to metal-mesh luminarias to, on page 20, the cheese grater luminaria.
Hard as it may be to imagine the early settlers of New Mexico lighting the way for Las Posadas with cheese graters, even this shows the persistent power of the luminarias' symbolism. The paper bags — or cheese graters or juice cans — capture the light the way boys in summertime catch lightning bugs in a jar. Their glow touches some primitive part of us, the residue of ancient peoples who once huddled around a bonfire to keep back the night, who once sent scouts to the mountaintop to watch for the dawn.
In our family, we've kept the glow of Christmas in our lives with our own rituals. Even as our daughter has grown, I've continued a tradition of reading her "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" and "Is There a Santa Claus?" (the famous response of the New York Sun newspaper to eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon's 1897 inquiry) — our own secular scriptures — each Christmas Eve at bedtime. (Never mind that in recent years she's able to stay up later than her parents can.) For a number of years, when we lived in places with reliable holiday snow, Santa's reindeer could be counted on to leave tracks in our yard, and Santa himself traced his path in footprints of magically unmelting snow across the carpet to the tree. (One memorable holiday, our nice Jewish neighbor in Pittsburgh took it upon himself to add to the magic by tossing rock salt on our roof. The sound — meant to suggest the clatter of tiny hooves of Dancer, Prancer et al — nearly led us to call the cops.)
And yes, each Christmas morning our daughter has dutifully re-enacted my childhood ritual of coming down the hall — or the stairs, when we've had them — to the glow of the Christmas tree and its welter of presents. My father's son, I set strict rules for this: No peeking until the tree is illuminated and parents are in place with cameras at the ready. By this point, of course, the cookies and milk left out for Santa the night before have been consumed, and only an orange nub remains of the carrot for Rudolph.
But this year, I don't know. Our daughter turned 21 over the summer — too old, I guess, for such traditions. (Though when we have grandchildren someday) As desperately as I might want to rewind the years and find myself, even just vicariously, standing once more in the long-awaited light of the Christmas tree, I have to let it go, the price of growing old, of even my child growing older.
"You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside," wrote the editors of the New York Sun in response to Virginia's famous letter, "but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, not even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding."
Is it all real, even when we're too old for Christmas morning? As real as the glow of a Christmas tree on a snowy dawn, as abiding as a bonfire lit to signal the sun's homecoming. Can a simple candle in a paper bag push aside the darkness and allow a glimpse of whatever holy lies beyond?
I may try it this year — who knows? Time for new traditions, for setting luminarias out by the front door in defiance of the wintry dark. In the mindful, simple act of lighting these candles, maybe I can find some new spark of that infinite promise I remember from Christmas mornings long ago.
The minister of the first church that my wife and I joined together, in wintry Minnesota, was fond of quoting from Isaiah 9:2 in his holiday sermon: "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined."
I think now, however, that the prophet Isaiah had it wrong. A "great light" would be easy to see, simple to follow. No trick at all in finding comfort in dark times with a great light shining upon you.
No, the challenge of modern life — much as it was for the ancients who feared the sun just might not come back this year — is finding hope and holiness in a tiny speck of light, as faint as a prayer, hardly visible amid the gathering gloom. How can the lamp keep burning when there's so little oil left? Won't the winter wind snuff out the small candle in its makeshift paper lantern? We stand like those scouts on the mountaintop, eyes straining through the overwhelming night to spy any sign of the sun. The people that walk in darkness must make do with the glow of a luminaria, the flicker of a farolito.
The light is the remembered gleam of a half-glimpsed Christmas tree.
A star in the east.
Moonrise on newfallen snow, casting shadows that could be reindeer hooves.
A bonfire, lighting the way for Las Posadas.
A guttering candle shielded by the flimsy walls of a paper bag.
For a world waiting for the light in a long, dark passage, it will have to be enough.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.
A Season of Lights Luminaria displays throughout the region in 2009 include: Dec. 4, Las Cruces — 6th Annual Trails of Lights, Downtown Mall and Las Cruces Railroad Museum. Information, 541-2288, 541-2000. Dec. 6, Las Cruces — Luminarias at Night/Noche de Luminarias on NMSU campus. Information, 646-3200. Dec. 11, Fort Selden State Monument — Annual Luminaria Tour. 5-9 p.m. Information, 526-8911. Dec. 11, Truth or Consequences — 1st Annual Festival of Lights on Austin Street. 6 - 9 p.m. Dec. 12, Elephant Butte State Park — Beachwalk Luminaria. 6-9 p.m. Information, 744-4708. Dec. 12, Rockhound State Park — Holiday Lights, 6-8 p.m. Dec. 24, Mesilla — Christmas Carols and Luminaria on the Plaza. 5:30-7:30 p.m. Information, 524-3262 ext. 116 or 117.
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