Canyon Road, Almost

There is a Christmas Eve tradition in Santa Fe where they essentially shut down parts of the downtown (namely the insanely dense cluster of art galleries along Canyon Road and the surrounding neighborhood), closing the streets to cars and turning off the street lights. People then walk around and enjoy the farolitos (candles placed in sand at the bottom of a brown paper lunch bag -- I've always seen them called luminaries in other parts of the country) lining all the adobe walls and fences. In several cul-de-sacs homeowners build mini-bonfires and hand out hot cider, and all the galleries on Canyon Road stay open late into the night (apparently... more on that in a second).

Knowing that we'd be heading out into sub-freezing temperatures and walking around the snowy streets I'd gone out during the day to get Evan some boots along with some other last-minute Christmas shopping (we'd hoped to get him new boots before the trip but we somehow never found the time). As usual he was not excited about wearing them the first time (it's always a struggle to get him to wear new shoes), but he warmed up to them after he saw Baby Bunny wearing them:

Canyon Road is only a little over a mile from Hallie's house, but since we were bringing two little guys out in the bitter cold we thought it best to drive as far as we could and then park and walk once the traffic became unbearable. We ended up staying out for around an hour, although I didn't get any good pictures of the farolitos (or anything else for that matter). Here are a couple of representative photos I found on flickr:

I did take this picture of Steph and Evan in front of one of the little bonfires, which Evan found quite fascinating:

I mentioned that the galleries on Canyon Road apparently stay open late into the night.  I say "apparently" because we never actually made it to Canyon Road. We were just following all the other people as we walked from our car, and at one point there was a pretty significant fork in the road and the number of people going either way was pretty much equal. We were directed to take the right fork when we asked someone which was the best way to Canyon Road, but it turns out he pointed us to the wrong fork. Instead we ended up wandering around the neighborhood surrounding our destination without ever getting there -- poking around Google Maps when we got home I found we were pretty close but we never knew to make the one turn that would take us there. We did end up stumbling upon a school where there were several fire trucks (always a big hit with Evan) and where they were launching aerial farolitos from:

That picture is obviously pretty awful, but we didn't know what was going on until the farolito was already drifting away, so I took the best shot I could get.  We'd seen a couple of these mini hot air balloons floating across the sky as we were walking through the neighborhood without really knowing what they were, so it was an unexpected treat to luck into a close-up view of one beginning its flight.  Check out this picture on flickr and the one or two after it for a better idea of what I'm talking about.

By the end of our jaunt we were hustling back to the car with an increasingly fussy 2-year old in Steph's arms (his hands were getting pretty cold despite his mittens, which for some reason caused his legs to shutdown) and a sleeping infant on me in the BabyBjörn (although the combination of my fleece jacket and his fuzzy bear suit seemed to do an adequate job keeping Alex warm), but I think it was worth it to experience some local culture firsthand.