The Paper Bags of Canyon Road

Every Christmas Eve at dusk, people gather at the foot of Canyon Road in Santa Fe and start walking. Brown paper bags line the way, outside the galleries and along the sidewalks, and each one holds an inch or two of sand and a single lit candle. The street is kept dark so the bags can do the work.

The walk is free and needs no ticket. It draws thousands, and the crowd sets the pace, which is slow. Officials suggest coming around 8 p.m. to miss the worst of it. Carolers sing along the way, and anyone may start a round. The cobblestones and uneven sidewalks make hard going for a stroller.

The road

Canyon Road was a footpath before it was a road, running between the Santa Fe River valley and Pecos Pueblo. The Acequia Madre, the old irrigation ditch, runs alongside it, and until the early 1900s the road served farms that drew on that water. Sheep went up it into the canyon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Then the railroad brought visitors, and painters followed. Olive Rush kept a studio at 630 Canyon, which she gave to the Society of Friends. More than eighty galleries, studios and shops stand along the road now, in the same low adobe, and on this one night their doorsteps hold paper bags.

The word

Here the bag is a farolito. That is the word in northern New Mexico. From Albuquerque south the same bag is a luminaria, and the argument over the name has run about four hundred years. The New Mexico History Museum traces it to 1590, to a December entry in an explorer's journal that called a set of bonfires luminarias.

The bonfire came first. Before the flat-bottomed paper bag, invented in 1872, and before votive candles were easy to buy, New Mexicans lit small fires on Christmas Eve. In Santa Fe the older word stayed with the older thing: a luminaria is still a small bonfire, and on the walk the two burn side by side. The lights are said to stand for Mary and Joseph's search for a posada, an inn, in Bethlehem.

San Antonio Street

A night that brings thousands to a neighborhood lands on the people who live there. Gracie Olivas told the Santa Fe Reporter in 2013 that it was very nice for visitors to come up for the walk. “But for the older people in this area, we’re inconvenienced because we can’t get anywhere on Christmas Eve.”

She and her neighbors light their own farolitos and hold their own walk on San Antonio Street, near the Acequia Madre. Sand, a paper bag, one candle, set out by hand along a street they know.