Inside Su Casa

Charles C. Poling

Luminaria is a lovely word that begins rolling off the tongue and ends with a soft sigh. The trouble is, using it to describe lunch bags filled with sand and a lit candle marking the holidays can ignite a heated argument in New Mexico. The controversy follows rough geographic lines. In the northern part of the state, tradition insists these festive decorations be called farolitos, Spanish for “little lanterns,” which well describes them. The term luminaria, on the other hand, refers to the evening bonfires lit on holidays or other special occasions. You’ll see them along the byways of Santa Fe and throughout the villages of the northern mountains on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Folks gather around them to get warm, share holiday greetings, and talk about everything people talk about when they congregate outside on a freezing but festive winter’s night. But growing up in Albuquerque, I always heard luminaria applied to the bag-lanterns. And in the city’s newer or more gentrified neighborhoods, a streetside bonfire would seem startlingly rustic, not to mention probably illegal.

Lest we be blinded to beauty by semantic argument, we’ll drop the words and simply consider the image. Those flickering paper lanterns strung like illuminated beads along undulating walls and curving walkways whisper “Feliz Navidad,” or the more neutral “Happy Holidays,” like a bedtime kiss. In New Mexico, they define the season, burning as icons to winter, to the quietening pause of the solstice, to the endurance of faith and tradition—even if they’re not yours. For Christians, they symbolically light the way for Christ into this world along a kind of spiritual runway. For kids today, they probably equally light the way to the Christmas tree. They also light up entire neighborhoods, which are then trolled by caravans of buses and cars, all with their lights off, passengers basking in the subtle candlelit glow.

When I was a young ’un, my family lived in the Albuquerque Country Club area, one of the quintessential luminaria neighborhoods. Residents don’t just dribble a few sagging bags along the driveway. They put out two years’ worth of lunch sacks filled with an entire parish’s supply of votive candles. Must be tons of sand. Except my family. About five doors down from the bedazzling Hebenstreit “castle,” we displayed maybe a dozen. When we moved into a less ornamental neighborhood, we trimmed back, setting out just one luminaria—on the mailbox. My dad’s personal tradition.

No feverish debate over vernacular Spanish terms can hold a candle to that.

Living in New Mexico, it’s hard to miss the art of the late Peter Hurd, whose ranch we feature in this issue.

Hurd gave my brother’s wife, the singer Katie Gill, a lovely pen-and-ink sketch, when she was a child. Hardly bigger than a postcard, the scene is classic Hurd: windmill, fence line, distant mountains evoked in spare, almost Zen-like dashes of black ink. I’m always amazed at how much space this postcard-sized sketch contains. In contrasting scale to this diminutive sketch, a mural-sized Hurd painting, “Conversation at the Gate,” decorates the downtown branch of Bank of America in Albuquerque. It’s a stunningly expansive scene, two cowboy’s chatting, grassland disappearing into the vanishing point, purple mountains, a windmill. Few paintings can match this one for capturing the gaping space of the Southwest.

Hurd is a regional treasure. Fortunately for us mere mortals, his Sentinel Ranch in San Patricio is a treasure we can share. Now operated as a bed and breakfast by his painter son, Michael, the ranch honors the family painting legacy—Hurd’s wife was Henriette Wyeth of the famous painting clan that included N.C. Wyeth, America’s most famous illustrator. As Elmo Baca writes in this issue, the ranch is a wonderful blend of New Mexico Territorial, Mexican folk colonial, and Hurd-Wyeth originality.