Lighting the way

Like so much else in Santa Fe, Christmas lights are different here. While there is a riot of wildly colored lights sparkling on the trees in the Plaza and a few houses with strings of multicolored blubs, the most beloved lights in the city are humble papers bags with votive candles set in inches of sand—farolitos. They line entrances and walkways and even appear in local cemeteries on Christmas Eve. Electric versions stretch across the rooflines of stores and hotels as well as private homes. 

Christmas Eve on Canyon Road

Instead of neighborhood fathers on ladders stringing up lights, families fold down the tops of plain brown paper bags and anchor small candles in a few handfuls of sand. Rather the driving around to see the lights and decorations on "Candy Cane Lane" locals and visitors stroll Canyon Road where the galleries and businesses set out rows of farolitos and light small fires called luminarias.

My first farolito

Christmas stories and iconography are full of bright stars, yet there is comfort in the soft glow of the farolitos that dot the landscape and lead us gently to our destinations. Tradition dates the lights to 1590 when a Spanish explorer noted the small bonfires his men had lit to guide a scout back to camp. By 1872 with the invention of flat-bottomed paper bags and the availability of votives, the small fires morphed into the farolitos that now guide us whether to worship, to celebrate or to gather around our own small fires sharing warmth and cheer with family and friends..