Roll The Bones: It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

The holidays have always been a celebration of traditions, old and new. Of all the holidays, Christmas embraces tradition in the most beautiful, heartfelt, and wonderful ways.

As a child, my family enjoyed many typical Christmas rituals. Decorating a pine tree with keepsake ornaments passed down from generation to generation. Arranging a snowy village of porcelain cottages on the fireplace mantle where our stockings hung. Baking buttery, sugary cookies from the dog-eared pages of Grandma’s cookbook. But every year at yuletide, we also came together to create something truly special for our small Midwestern town: filling brown paper bags with sand and tea candles, then lining the streets with warm, glowing luminaria.

Like most holiday traditions, luminaria has religious roots but has since been cheerfully repurposed by us heathens for the sake of cute holiday cheer. In the 1600s, Spanish missionaries lit farolitos beacon fires outside churches to guide their flock to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. My family couldn’t have cared less about the religious symbolism; we did luminaria because my mom rightfully believed it was a charming act of community, kinship, and Christmas magic.

Our family tradition began in 1991, when I was two years old. After seeing luminaria in a nearby Chicagoland neighborhood, my mom asked my dad to recreate the display on our street as her Christmas present. He started modestly with 150 bags, but over the next 25 years, it snowballed into an annual event that drew dozens of neighbors to our house on Christmas Eve morning for mugs of hot chocolate or hot buttered rum, Christmas cookies, and a full day of assembling and placing thousands of luminaria.

Everyone had to learn the proper technique. First, fold the top edge of the brown paper bag down two inches and crease it crisply by running it through your pinched fingers. This job usually went to my dad’s closest friends, who preferred working in the heated basement, sneaking beers from the fridge, and telling dirty jokes out of earshot of the kids.

Then came the sand. Toddlers got this job because, while they were otherwise useless, they were happy to sit on the cold ground, reach their stubby arms into 50-pound sacks, and pour a clumsy cupful of sand into each bag.

Teenagers took those bags, centered one tea candle in the sand, and stood up the wick. If the candle wasn’t centered, the bag could catch fire and burn down. If the wick wasn’t upright, it would freeze to the candle and be impossible to light.

Fully assembled bags were packed into the cargo holds of minivans, and a driver plus two “walkers” would head out into the bitter winter cold. With the tailgate open, the walkers grabbed bags and placed them along the curb “three long strides apart.”

By midday, the luminaria were waiting in long lines, but we saved the lighting for sunset. As daylight faded, front doors opened all at once and neighbors spilled out with lighters in hand. The final candles were lit as the last streaks of sunlight slipped away, and within minutes, cars from all over Chicagoland crawled through our neighborhood with their headlights off, using the luminaria as their only light.

It remains one of the most beautiful memories of my childhood. As much as it pained us to stop, we ended our tradition in 2014 as my dad was losing his battle with cancer, and none of us had the spirit to continue without him. Thankfully, another family on our block took up the mantle, and for the past eleven years, they have kept our tradition alive and glowing.

In May 2015, one week before my dad died, the neighborhood kids asked their parents if they could surprise him with a luminaria display so he could enjoy it one last time. They had grown up in our backyard, chugging hot chocolates and assembling bags, and they wanted to show him how much he meant to them. That night, he sat on the front porch, looked out at the flickering bags, and cried for the last time in his life.

Our luminaria tradition transcended typical holiday cheer, becoming something endearing and deeply special not just for us, but for everyone around us. This Christmas, my family is staying with us in our new Denver home. We’ll make new traditions like painting ornaments for each other in our home studio and making different kinds of homemade pasta for Christmas dinner  and revive one old tradition: luminaria on Christmas eve.

We’ll start small, but we’ll keep going, year after year, until the whole neighborhood glows warm with kinship, community, and holiday joy just like I remember.