Luminarias

It's been a while since I traveled in December. It's honestly a tough time to get away. I mean with holiday parties (well, pre-COVID anyway...) and presents to buy and not to mention multiple holiday days off in late November and then again about month later. We took a couple of quick out of town December trips way back in 2013 (Iceland) and then again in 2014 (Key West / Everglades) but since then, absolutely nothing. Until this year, that is, when we got away for a week to New Mexico. And I do love me some New Mexico.

Despite the seven years of no travel at this time of year, getting away in December is actually one of my favorite times of the year to explore somewhere new. And it's that way for one reason and one reason alone: to see how Christmas is celebrated in other parts of the country or the world. In Iceland, we discovered that country's love / hate relationship with the Yule Lads. This year, we found some awesome holiday traditions in New Mexico.

Now, full disclosure (and limiting my complaining about COVID to one small paragraph) here, we were supposed to be in Vienna, Austria this month browsing the many, many Christmas markets in that city while drinking gluhwein and eating whatever good stuff they serve at the markets over there. But COVID shut down the entire country (OK, so actually the Austrian government did that because of COVID) and cancelled that trip, leaving Vienna in December on a scrap heap with Costa Rica, the United Kingdom and gorilla watching in central Africa from 2020. Maybe next year for Vienna. And Costa Rica. And maybe the United Kingdom. We'll see...

Chile ristras at the Albuquerque Holiday Market.

Biscochitos at Golden Crown Panaderia, Albuquerque.

I have a few things to say about Christmas in New Mexico.

First, the Albuquerque Holiday Market at the Rail Yards is awesome. It's held one weekend per year and that happened to be the weekend we landed in ABQ. I am sure that the markets in Vienna would have been larger, more numerous and filled with way more stuff to buy and eat than the one at the Rail Yards but it doesn't really matter. We stuffed our faces with good food; browsed more Zia-adorned items than we really could have imagined; got a look at our first chile ristras of the trip (there would be many, many more) including some wreaths (so cool...); and walked away with some amazing buys, including an awesome red, metal-and-stone roadrunner sculpture that cost us three times as much to ship as it did to buy and it's going to be so worth it when it arrives in front of our house after Christmas. 

And when I say metal and stone, I really mean the stone is a large pebble that weighs about five pounds. It's so awesome. Trust me.

Second, they have these cookies call biscochitos that are legendary and actually live up to their legendary status. Biscochitos are shortbread-like cookies of Spanish colonial origin that are traditionally baked for celebrations like weddings and important other family gatherings. But particularly for family gatherings at Christmas. The classic biscochito is flavored with anise because anise was rare in colonial Spanish territories and thus saved for special occasions. I hate anise. I really don't understand why anyone would voluntarily eat or drink anything flavored with this stuff. Fortunately for me in 21st century New Mexico, bakeries make biscochitos in other flavors. We headed to local bakery Golden Crown Panaderia for an afternoon snack featuring all four varieties of their biscochitos (blue corn, cappuccino, chocolate and, yes, traditional). 

These things are so soft while also being crisp. It is difficult to describe how texturally amazing these cookies are but it's like they are made of packed sand and they just disintegrate into the most delicious, slightly sweet crumbles when you bite down and and press them between your tongue and the roof of your mouth. The flavoring at Golden Crown is so subtle that the texture and the hint of sugar dominates in the best sort of way. Even the anise almost melts away entirely to something actually pleasing. The cappuccino and chocolate were the best in my opinion.

Christmas lights in the Santa Fe Plaza...

and in some random (but definitely not atypical) Albuquerque neighborhood.

Third, New Mexico loves Christmas lights. But Albuquerque might just take that love to an entirely new level.

Now, I realize there are some people out there who are pretty fanatical about decorating their houses for Christmas. But we took a nighttime holiday lights tour with the ABQ Trolley Company that has me convinced that no city anywhere does Christmas decoration like the Duke City. I'm talking houses decked out with light displays of every variety imaginable. I'm talking large projected images onto the sides of houses. I'm talking entire neighborhoods seemingly in competition between houses to see who has bragging rights (there were lots of neighborhoods like this). I'm talking light displays synchronized to music. I'm talking houses with short wave radio broadcasts playing Christmas songs when you tune to their frequency of choice. I took a number of photos from the inside our of 90 minute or so trek around town and have included one above. But honestly, no photo could do this tour justice.

But that's not even the craziest part. Apparently it's an Albuquerque thing to cover your car in lights and then drive around town looking at other people's Christmas light displays. You read that right: DRIVE AROUND TOWN!!! I'm not kidding, we saw a car coated with Christmas lights just rolling around whatever Albuquerque neighborhood we happened to be in. I swear I have never seen anything like that. Maybe I'm sheltered.

One more (admittedly slightly blurry) picture from our trolley tour. Luminarias straight ahead.

But none of that was the best part about pre-Christmas in New Mexico. The best part was the luminarias.

Visit New Mexico between Thanksgiving and Christmas and you are bound to see what look like illuminated brown paper bags on the roofs and in the windows and lining the walkways and filling the gardens of all sorts of adobe and non-adobe stores and houses and hotels and any other sort of building that humans live or work in. And not just one per store or house or other sort of building. I mean like 10 or 20 or 50 or more regularly spaced bags in sequence providing a type of illumination that we'd never seen before we visited the Land of Enchantment in December. These are the luminarias.

The tradition of lighting up properties to symbolically welcome the baby Jesus into the world stretches back all the way to Spanish colonial times, some 300 plus years ago. The first luminarias in a time when paper bags were not readily available were made as small bonfires of piñon branches set alight. When paper became available, the tradition changed to paper bags with small candles inside and a couple of cups of sand to keep the bags from blowing away. Today, I think you are unlikely to find actual candles inside actual paper bags. Most of the luminarias we saw in our week or so in state were a string of pre-wired plastic rectangles in the shape and color of brown paper bags, although we did see some actual individual paper bags weighted with sand and holding an LED tealight. More effort to turn on than flipping a switch but the lack of wires connecting the bags together is a nice bonus. Both options seemed much safer than actual flames inside actual paper bags. 

Luminarias in Albuquerque's Old Town. Waiting for nightfall (top) and illuminated (bottom).

For as simple as these lights are, they are surprisingly effective and romantic. Or maybe it's actually because they are so simple. They harken back to a time that seems to be less complicated, when resources were scarcer and when buying paper bags and candles and putting them together was an extravagance. They pair especially well with the old adobe and wood buildings in Santa Fe's historic downtown and Albuquerque's Old Town. Or even in all sorts of Albuquerque residential neighborhoods alongside animated lights displays and giant inflatable structures. They just work. They are pretty much the most perfect Christmas reflection of the state's colonial and wild west roots. 

We don't spend a lot of time decorating our townhouse for Christmas. We have a nativity display I've collected over the last 20 or so years and we have a plug-in three foot high Christmas tree that we cover with souvenir ornaments from all our various travels throughout the United States and the world. But next year, I'd seriously consider getting some paper bags and dropping some sand and tealights in them and lighting up our windows or mantel or some other part of our home. And of course, they sell luminaria kits on Amazon.

Our Santa Fe hotel, lit up with luminarias, of course.

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How We Did It

It's not difficult to find luminarias in New Mexico in December. At least not if you are in Santa Fe or Albuquerque.

If you are in Albuquerque near Christmas, I'd highly recommend the ABQ Trolley Company's Trolley of Lights Tour. It's about an hour and a half long in a very poorly heated old trolley but it's a complete blast. They take you to some just mind-blowing light displays (and I mean that in the best "what are these people thinking?" way) mostly north of downtown. They also keep you distracted and entertained en route with Christmas movie clips and trivia, including a half impossible name that tune exercise. I think I'm pretty good at name that Christmas song but Slade? Really?

I'd also highly recommend seeking out some biscochitos in your time in New Mexico at any time of the year. Our sample size was pretty much as small as it gets but Albuquerque's Golden Crown Panaderia will not steer you wrong in the biscochito department. They had some pretty good looking non-biscochito baked goods also. Next time, maybe.

Finally, the picture of the burrito on the top of this post has almost nothing really to do with Christmas. It's available year round at Tia Sophia's restaurant on San Francisco Street in Santa Fe. But it does look festive, right? That's because in New Mexico a lot of foods are available with a green or red chile smother. If you want it half and half like I did the chilly Monday morning we were in Santa Fe, just ask for Christmas. Your server will know what you mean.

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Azulejos

Our trip to Portugal this past October took us from Lisbon to the Alentejo to Coimbra to Porto. It took us to cafes and past farms and vineyards and into castles and museums and bakeries and past bridges and to lots and lots and lots and lots of monasteries and churches. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour that touched on some of the highlights of the country and barely scratched the surface in most places. It was an introduction.

If there was a single constant through our entire week in country, I would have to say it would be the ceramic tiles. Sound like a strange thing to highlight as a cohesive memory binding a week long vacation together in a gorgeous European country? Expecting castles or all those monasteries or sardines or hills or churches or art or Cristiano Ronaldo or salt cod or a Mediterranean climate or something else? It was none of those. It was ceramic tiles. It was the one thing we found everywhere we went in Portugal. And to be honest, there are some spectacular looking tiles over there. 

I know maybe what you are thinking: don't we have ceramic tiles in the United States? Well, yes we do. But not like they have in Portugal. If you have been there or if you go in the future, you will know what I'm talking about. It's pretty obvious. These things are everywhere. Just walk the streets. There are buildings everywhere that are tiled on the outside. Think you won't notice? You will. You can't escape it. It is literally inescapable. And if by some chance you don't pick up on it by walking down the street, it will hit you over the head in every church and convent and palace and monastery you visit. And you will visit a lot of these, especially those monasteries. There are a ton of them. I might have already mentioned that.

Azulejo covered buildings in Coimbra (top) and Lisbon (bottom).

Now in Portugal, of course, they don't call them tiles. They call them azulejos. And if you are wondering how to pronounce that word (we were...), it's a-zu-le-jos, not az-ul-e-jos (hopefully that non-dictionary guide makes sense; the "l" belongs to the "lejos" and not the "azul"). The word itself is derived from an Arabic word meaning "polished stone". And Arabic and Muslim lands is not just the origin of the word. It's the source of the tiles themselves.

Azulejos were introduced to the Iberian peninsula in the 13th century by the Moors, who conquered and held much of Portugal and parts of Spain beginning in the 10th century until they were driven out a few hundred years later. Coincidentally that was just about the time that azulejos started to become widely used on buildings in southern Spain. 

While tiles started to become a thing in Spain about the end of the Moorish occupation, it would take a little longer before the azulejos started being used in a common way in what is now Portugal, although the use of mosaics for sidewalks and public paved squares had already been popular for a couple of hundred years when they started decorating the walls of places with these things. Think 15th century and think simple geometric or naturalistic motifs in blue and white only. This is all the Moors had available to them so that's all they used to make these things back in the 1400s.

As Portugal embarked on their age of discovery in the 16th century, they started to import goods which would forever change their way of life. On the tile manufacturing front, trips back and forth to what is now Asia brought yellow dyes which added a third color to the two-tone azulejos that were already so popular. At the same time, the tile artisans started to supplement the regular and repeating patterning with narrative scenes or pictures, effectively creating large scale artworks through tiles.

Tiles (ca. 1680) from the Museu Nacional do Azulejos (top) and St. Michael's Chapel, Coimbra University (bottom).

Those new, large scale scenes seemed to become the next point of departure for azulejos artisans as we entered the 17th century. I can't tell you how many churches and monasteries and train stations we visited with detailed scenes upon scenes from history or the Bible constructed out of tiles 4" or smaller. These things must have been created off site somewhere as a giant sort of canvas and then put back together in situ. And they most always were just simple blue and white, taking a step back a couple of hundred years but in a totally different level of detail and precision.

If churches seem like an odd place to find these murals of azulejos, they shouldn't. For a while, the Catholic church was the main patron of azulejo artisans. Think about the number of paintings and sculptures in churches all around the world. There was a time that the only secure place to have a commissioned work of art was in a church or cathedral. Think Michelangelo in Rome. Think Goya in Madrid. Think azulejos in Portugal. And there is a whole of Catholicism in Portugal.

To get a great look at tiled buildings everywhere we went in Portugal, we walked the streets, we visited churches, we visited monasteries (have I mentioned there are a few of those in Portugal?), we visited castles, we visited palaces. But for a more in depth and formal learning experience, we stopped by the Museu Nacional do Azulejos in Lisbon. Yes, there is a whole museum dedicated to the history of tile work in Portugal.

The Museu is located in the old Madre de Deus convent on the east side of the city. The Museu features both original azulejo artwork in their original spaces and exhibits extracted from elsewhere in the country and moved and displayed in the halls of the convent. Arguably the start attraction in the museum is the main church space, which features blue and white tiled murals in the style that became popular in the 17th century, but there are other similarly impressive exhibits hanging elsewhere in the Museu accompanied by plentiful signage in Portuguese and English. 

Two of the more interesting exhibits in the Museu for me were a tile mold for making tiles with raised patterns and the scene (in tile form, of course) of Lisbon before the great earthquake of 1755 which ends the museum's visit sequence. We saw so few molded tiles in Portugal but we did find some on the walls of buildings in Porto and Sintra; these mini-sculptures are in some ways a lot more interesting than the flat painted tiles we found elsewhere. I also appreciated the scene of Lisbon pre-earthquake as an historical record. It was different and (to me) far more informative than the Biblical scenes we found all over the religious buildings we traipsed through during our time in Portugal.

Museu Nacional do Azulejos: the church, the great Lisbon panorama and the Chicken's Wedding.

I can't tell you how many pictures of tiles I ended up with on my phone after a week in Portugal but it was a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if they made up half of the total pictures that I took during the week. There were a lot because honestly I found these things super interesting. Maybe borderline obsessive. "Maybe" and "borderline" means not really, right?

I think for me, I was more fascinated by the earlier, simpler patterned blue, white and gold azulejos than the later blue and white large scale artworks. I know that part of this attraction was fueled by the Moorish connection. We worked hard to try to find any remnant of Moorish culture in the places we visited and were largely unable, probably because when the Christians drove out the Moors they destroyed most or all of what they had created. Maybe by the time the Moors were defeated the Portuguese didn't remember where the azulejos came from in the first place.

I also appreciated some of the earlier departures from the simple patterning into actual scenes of life real or imagined. There are some really impressive views into daily Portuguese life in some of these tiled works, along with some very fanciful scenes of ridiculousness like the Chicken's Wedding that we found in the Museu Nacional do Azulejos. Seriously, there's a chicken's wedding scene in multicolored tiles. Who thinks up this stuff in the middle (or maybe a little later) of the last millennium?

If you are thinking all that would likely mean that I was not a fan of the later and almost exclusively Biblical artworks created for the churches and monasteries, you would be correct. I just don't get the amount of effort that went into these things and I'm not a super fan of the subject matter either. They are so serious but some churches really got into these things, commissioning about as many works as would fill either the interior or exterior of their buildings. There's a church in Porto (the Chapel of Souls) that has gone full arm sleeve on us and covered pretty much every square inch of available exterior wall space with tiles.

The Chapel of Souls in Porto (top) and a molded or stamped tile in the Pena Palace in Sintra.

Azulejos are clearly a symbol of national pride for the Portuguese. There are so many old buildings with centuries-old tiles inside and outside that have endured over the centuries. But it also appears that there is an ongoing effort to resurrect this tradition in a more modern way, meaning not just copying the colors or motifs of centuries of several hundred years ago. I think we saw this beautifully in the main train station in Porto. 

Porto's train station features some older works of tiled art showing scenes from Portugal's history, including a massive battle scene on the west side (if I'm remembering correctly) of the main entrance hall. But next to these historical artworks are more modern tiles showing locomotives. They aren't necessarily using the colors or subject matter used in azulejos laid in the 15th through 17th centuries, (although honestly the top portion shown below is remarkably reminiscent of the 16th century azulejos) but they ARE tiles. And they do remind us of Portugal's history of this sort of wall treatment. I love it. Well done!

I know it's a strange thing to memorialize as a memory of Portugal but honestly, I'll always remember the azulejos.

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How We Did It

As I hope comes across in this post, it is not difficult to find azulejos in Portugal. We found them to be plentiful in Lisbon and Sintra and Coimbra and Porto, although perhaps a little more difficult to find in Évora.

Other than wandering around the streets of these cities and discovering, I thought it was worthwhile visiting the Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon. The Museu is located at Rua da Madre de Deus, 4 and is easily reachable by public transportation. We took either the 759 or 794 bus directly there from the Plaça do Comércio. The total bus ride is about 15 minutes or so. The Museu is open daily except Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. although they do close for lunch every day for an hour starting at 1 p.m.

There are definitely tiled buildings worth visiting in Sintra, Coimbra and Porto in addition to Lisbon. Some are pictured in this post although quite frankly there were many more pictures left on the cutting room floor. Other than the Museu, I don't have a strong feeling either way about the value in seeking out these other buildings. There are literally tiled buildings pretty much everywhere.

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