Christmas Crafts

Douglas Johnson likes to make holiday paintings depicting the bright side of a harsh time in New Mexico history.

One features members of the San Juan Pueblo conducting the Turtle Dance to celebrate the return of the sun after the winter solstice. In the background is a pueblo-style church. Another of his paintings is a Matachina—a dance celebrating when Native Americans took back power for a brief period of time from the Spanish colonialists.

Johnson puts these paintings on holiday greeting cards that are sold around town. The point of them, he says, is also to capture a moment in Christmas history.

"They depict ancient Indian ceremonies that were performed for the winter solstice but were moved over to Christmas to satisfy the demands of the Catholic Church during the colonial period," he says. "They depict how the Indians have adapted to the onslaught of the Catholic Church."

In a town known for its distinct ways of celebrating Christmas, plenty of stores carry holiday ornaments and decorations from local craftspeople. Johnson came to the area in 1969 "with the first wave of hippies after Woodstock," he says. Since then he's been a professional artist, a job he says he'll continue until the day he dies. His work can be found at local stores like the New Mexico History Museum and Susan's Christmas Shop, which features the work of roughly 40 local artists.

"Everything in the shop is handmade, and most of it is from here," says Susan Webber, who has run the shop for 37 years.

Johnson says his Christmas cards are also focused on local architecture and "how the colonist, with the materials at hand, created what they call Santa Fe Style and how the churches are integrated with the architecture of the pueblos."

Santa Fe resident Debbie Kerwick takes a different traditional approach to her handmade holiday ornaments. Her hobby started roughly 20 years ago, when she came across old Christmas baking molds for cookies. They reminded her of her childhood growing up in a predominately German neighborhood in St. Louis.

"I just fell in love with them at a very young age," Kerwick says.

Around Christmastime, her family would bake cookies with holiday designs on them. When Kerwick rediscovered the molds in adulthood, she went back to baking cookies. Soon, she felt the need to hunt down more old-time Christmas molds and needed money. Most of the originals are carved out of wood and date back hundreds of years. In other words, they’re rare and expensive.

"I thought, how can I make money to support my habit?" she says.

So for the past two decades, Kerwick has been selling tree ornaments made by pressing handmade paper to the molds. The task can be somewhat labor intensive, as she starts by gathering recycled paper and making her own white paper out of it. She then wets and presses the paper, which can take up to a full day to dry.

Each of her ornaments has an old-time, pre-Coca Cola Christmas feel to it. They include designs of snowmen, gingerbread houses and Old St. Nick standing in front of a Christmas tree. Kerwick estimates that she makes hundreds of these out of 25 different designs year-round.

Each ornament is stringed with a bead and comes with a holiday greeting card. They sell for $7.50 each at Susan's shop, one of Santa Fe's two year-round Christmas stores located near each other on Palace Avenue. While Susan's focuses on locally handmade items, The Shop—A Christmas Store features a broader range of holiday material.

Santa Fe Reporter