I Love New Mexico

About the Episode:

We couldn’t let the holiday season go by without sharing some of the best and most New Mexican style Christmas traditions! Bunny shares some of her personal family stories as well as what’s going on around the state right now (and every year around this time). Listen now to hear what you need to have on your calendar for the next week. What’s your favorite holiday traditions? Let us know on our Facebook or Instagram pages or at ilovenewmexicoblog@gmail.com

Links
Farm and Ranch Museum Website

Christmas on the Pecos

A Christmas Carol at the Farmington Civic Center on December 23

Winter Wonderland at Expo New Mexico

A Ceremony of Carols

Gremlins at the Jean Cocteau

Winter Solstice singing at The Candyman

Night at the Opera on Christmas Eve

River of Lights at the ABQ Bio Park
Bunny’s website
Buy Bunny’s book on Amazon
I Love New Mexico Instagram
I Love New Mexico Facebook
Original Music by: Kene Terry

Featuring:

Bunny Terry

Bunny Terry is a native New Mexican who grew up on a farm in northeastern New Mexico where she always dreamed of being a writer. Bunny was living in Santa Fe in 2012 when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. For almost a year, Bunny underwent chemotherapy, had surgery to remove large chunks of her colon and liver, and then had chemo again. Throughout this experience she continued to write 1,000 words a day about cancer and her journey. Thinking that perhaps her words had the power to help at least one cancer patient find hope, she took those words and gathered up a few more and turned them into Life Saving Gratitude, which is a both a story of her survival and a handbook for how gratitude and positivity were indispensable tools in her survival.

Bunny lives in Santa Fe with her husband and has four children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandson.

She is at work on a second book, Where I Come From, a collection of essays, mostly true, about the small town on the eastern plains of New Mexico where some of her 62 cousins live. She’s also developing 365 Days of Life Saving Gratitude, a combination planner and inspiration journal.

Bunny is available for speaking engagements on how gratitude can change your life, your business, your health, and your relationships. 

Episode Transcript

Bunny: (00:00)
Hi there. I’m Bunny Terry, and you’re listening to the I Love New Mexico podcast. Whether you’re a native New Mexican who’s lived here for your entire life, or you’re just considering a visit, this episode is for you. Join us as we share a lot of New Mexico’s stories, talk about all things New Mexico, and include topics like what’s magical here, where you ought to visit, what’s happening, and the things you absolutely cannot miss in the Land of Enchantment. We’re excited that you’re here and we can’t wait to show you what an amazing place New Mexico is, because let’s face it, I love New Mexico.

Bunny: (00:49)
Happy Holidays to everyone. Um, we are here on December 20th, 2022, and when we first decided to create this week’s podcast, we, my producer and Johanna Medina, who is also my daughter and who has spent every Christmas of her life with me. The two of us talked about having, um, different folks on maybe somebody from Red River, maybe somebody from Carlsbad to talk about, um, lights on the Pecos. We, we had a lot of different ideas, but in the end, I told Johanna that I wanted to be able to tell you about some Christmas stories of my own, as well as giving you some ideas for spontaneous Christmas, celebrating, um, things that you could do between now and through the end of December that will give you a real taste of the holidays in New Mexico. My own idea of the perfect holiday is to be, um, first of all to go to church on Christmas Eve, to do the Canyon Road walk, maybe to have dinner somewhere downtown the compound, or Geronimo’s or Elfa roll so that I can park when I do the Canyon Road walk, and then to get up on Christmas morning and walk down to the plaza and have a cup of coffee at the Plaza Cafe. And I’m gonna tell you, one of the things that we promised to do on the I Love New Mexico blog between now and Christmas is list a number of places that are open to provide, um, dinner, um, on Christmas Day, because, um, I know if you’re visiting from out of town, you’re gonna be hungry and you’re not gonna want to eat at Denny’s, which of course is something I did one Christmas when I forgot to make reservations. But, um, usually if, if I’m not spending Christmas in Santa Fe, which I’m going to do this year, I will spend Christmas in Logan, New Mexico with my family this year. We’ll do that. We’ll go there on the 27th and spend an extended four or or five days with all of my siblings and their kids. Um, hopefully I’ll always have a baby on my lap and lots of Abuelos hot chocolate and Biscochitos.

Bunny: (03:12)
So, um, let’s get started. I wanna talk about how my family used to celebrate Christmas. I grew up on the, out on plains of Eastern New Mexico in Logan, and both of my grandmothers, my granny Terry and my grandma Ayres, lived in Tucumcari. And we always, without fell when I was a little girl, would leave our house with all the presents under the tree, with the tree that we had gone out into. Um, what my parents called the breaks, which is the canyons out behind our house. We, we would always go there and cut down a cedar tree. We didn’t buy trees. It was unheard of for somebody to go to town and buy a Christmas tree. And of course, we didn’t have, um, fake trees when I was a little girl at Logan Elementary School. All of the elementary teachers had an aluminum Christmas tree in the classroom, and they had a color wheel that made this creaky noise as it went around and, um, lit up the primary colors on the aluminum tree. That sound is the sound of Christmas in my childhood, is the color wheel on the aluminum Christmas tree. And we would, um, long before school was out, we would have a Christmas program and we would always sing up on the housetop, and then we would end with silent night, because of course, that was when it was okay to still sing, um, non-SEC music at the Christmas pageant. Um, the night before Christmas Eve. So on Christmas Eve Eve, we would always go to the Baptist Church, have a little pageant where we sang all of the Christmas songs, and then Santa Claus would come, there would be a real tree in the corner of the church, and Santa Claus would come and give us paperbacks filled with hard candy and raw peanuts and oranges. So those, while the, um, while the color wheel on the aluminum Christmas tree is the sound of Christmas to me, those brown paper bags full of hard Christmas, I mean, hard candy and raw peanuts and oranges are the taste of Christmas for me.

Bunny: (05:51)
So one of the other traditions, the thing that we always did was on Christmas Eve, we would go to Tucumcari and have Christmas Eve celebration with my Grandma Ays, and all of my cousins would come. My mom is the youngest of 10 children on the heir side, and that’s A Y R E s. So if there’s anybody out there spelling their name that way, I’m sure we’re cousins. Um, it’s, it’s not a, a, um, a spelling that is normally it’s a y e r s, but my mother’s maiden name is heirs. And we would go to my grandma a’s house and we’d have a huge dinner. And she cooked for what seemed like Cox’s army, although it was her army. And there were probably, um, 20 cousins there. I’m the youngest of all the cousins, and the cousins would come from Colorado and from Texas and from Santa Fe. I had cousins from here. And, and everyone would show up and there would be a present under the tree for every cousin and for every couple in my grandma’s family. But before, and, and let me back up, because before we got big enough to understand, um, some of the truths of Christmas, the little ones didn’t have any tree, any, any treats under the tree, no gifts under grandma’s tree because Santa Claus brought them. My grandma had Santa Claus every Christmas Eve of her life. And even when my mom was little, um, Santa Claus always came, one of the uncles might dress up as Santa Claus because of course it was too early for him to come in the evening on his sleigh. So one of the uncles or um, one of the cousins would dress up as Santa Claus and a couple of the uncles would, would get up on the roof and make noises, clump, clump, clump.

Bunny: (07:53)
I don’t know what they had blocks of wood or something. And we would wait. As little kids, we would wait with our eyes wide and we would hear that clump, clump, clump of the reindeer. And, and the rule was that nobody could go outside while we were waiting for Santa. And then there would be a knock on the door because my Grand Myers, of course, didn’t have a fireplace, and that was far too fancy. And we would hear the clump, clump plump on the roof, a knock on the door. And grandma would open the door wide and she would say, Santa, you came, you came again. And Santa Claus would come in with his big fat belly and his white beard, and he would ho ho ho everybody in the room. And then he would sit down and he would open up his bag, and inside each his bag would be my present. Santa Claus would’ve shown up, especially at my grandma’s house to bring my present to me. And it was the most amazing thing in the world to be a little kid at Grandma Ayers’s house because Santa came and, and visited with us. We didn’t have to wait until midnight and we didn’t have to put up, um, cookies and milk, although we did, because we knew that he was gonna be hungry when he showed up. He would hand out the gifts, he would give us all a hug, and then he would say, I have places to go. I have other gifts to hand out. And he would go out the door, and once again, we would hear a clump, clump, clump on the roof. And then only then when Santa Claus had gone would re it was so magical. My Aunt Christelle always told the story that when she was a little girl, which wasn’t a little girl, she was like 15 years old, and she still believed in Santa Claus. And one day before Christmas, grandma was looking up in the closet for something and the Santa Claus suit fell out of the top of the closet. And my Aunt Christelle, who was a teenager, said, mama, what is that? And she said, Chris, I’ve been meaning to tell you that’s not Santa Claus that comes to our house. That’s Uncle Tom dressed up in the Santa Claus costume. And Chris said, oh, no. Oh no, I can’t believe it. And then she said, but mama, what about Betty? Does she still, and Betty is my mom, Betty Louise Ays was my mom. And, and she said, does, does she know that Santa Claus isn’t real? And my aunt, my grandma said, well, Santa Claus is real as long as you believe in him, but the Santa Claus that comes to our house is dressed up. And no, you can’t tell Betty because she believes that Santa, the Santa Claus that comes to our house, this is a real Santa Claus.

Bunny: (10:43)
And years later, I would ask my Aunt, crystal, well, how do you, what do you think? My mom figured out that that wasn’t the real Santa Claus. And she said, oh, we all figured, Kenneth told her. Kenis was my dad who married my mom when she was 15 years old. But Santa Claus always came to Grandma’s house. And the year that I got suspicious was when Santa Claus was my brother Cle, and there was a hole in the Santa suit. And when Santa Claus knocked on the door, there was the clump, clump clump on the roof. And when Santa Claus knocked on the door and came in and he said, ho, ho, ho, I thought that sounds just like Cle. And at the time I was about nine years old, maybe 10. And so Cle would’ve been 17 years old, and was not very tall.

Bunny: (11:38)
And somebody said, my Uncle Marvin said, Santa Claus, you’re kind of, you look kind of short what happened. And the Santa Claus, who I suspected might be my brother Cle, dressed up in the suit, said, well, when I jumped off the roof roof, it jammed my legs and it made me shorter. And I looked, the Santa Claus suit had a hole in it and in the belly. And I looked and I thought that looks like my grandma’s pillowcase was a green pillowcase that I slept on when I was a little girl. And I thought, wait, wait, wait, wait. That I, I stepped away. And I thought, wait just a second. I don’t know. And I looked around at everybody in the room and I thought, I’m the youngest cousin here. Everybody else knows that that is in that Santa Claus suit. Now I wanna tell you, I think Santa Claus still comes every night on Christmas Eve. He just didn’t come to my grandma’s house. That was my brother Cle dressed up when I was 10 years old. So that was our Christmas Eve tradition. And then, then we would get in the car and go home. And as we drove home the 24 miles to our house out on the farm in Logan, my dad would say, look at the sky and see if you can see the star of the east, the star that led the wise men to Jesus in the major. And we would sing on the way home and we would sing joy to the world, and we wish you a merry Christmas. And then we would watch for the star in the east. And, and sometimes, um, some years in, uh, there would be a bright star shining, and I wish we’re shining in the moon on, on the right side of the road, on the east side of the road.

Bunny: (13:32)
My dad would always say, look at that bright star that’s we’re shining in the moon on, on the right side of the road on the east side of the road. My dad would always say, look at that bright star. That’s the east star, that’s the star that led the wise man to Jesus. Then we would go home and open a presence, and there were always presents under our tree. I know that one year my dad sold a gun so that he could afford to buy Christmas presents. I know that one year he worked as a road grader because he was farming all the time. And farming was, um, one of those occupations where there was not a lot of money. , sometimes there was money for groceries, but there wasn’t money for Christmas trees. So my parents always did whatever magical thing they could do to create Christmas at our house. We opened presents at home on Christmas Eve, and then on Christmas morning we would get up and get dressed and go to gran to my granny Terry’s where all the Terry cousins were. My dad is the youngest of 10 as well. And I had even more cousins on the Terry side. And we, we would go back to Tuum Carey to have Christmas lunch and open presents at my Granny Terry’s house. So in my family, Christmas was always a pile of family gather together. So I don’t know what your traditions are. I would love to hear them. Now we do Christmas in Santa Fe, then we go to Logan and we’re always, I’m so grateful. We’re always surrounded by lots of family. If you haven’t established any Christmas traditions or if you’re looking for something to do, maybe you’re far from home this Christmas, I have a few ideas and I’m gonna tell you about them.

Bunny: (15:17)
In fact, today, on the 20th of December, one of the things that you can do if you’re in Las Cruces is go to the Farm Lala at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum. And I’m telling you, if you haven’t been to this museum, it’s having what they call a fun festive winter evening at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum. And its families can take trolley rides across the bridge. You get to go around the light at 47 acre campus. There are fun activities you get to children get to ride ponies. I mean, I’m sorry that I’m not in Las Cruces today. There’s gonna be hot chocolate s’mores and ice cream. The admission is five bucks per family. The pony rides are gonna be five bucks a ride. And some of the activities are going to include making marshmallow snowman and Christmas tree ornaments. So that’s one thing that you could think about doing today on December 20th. And I’m gonna give you a whole list of other ideas here. I’ve I, the, the coolest, one of the coolest things that’s gonna be happening is the, um, um, Christmas on the Pecos is going on right now in Carlsbad. Every night we’re going to provide a link, but every night there are 40 different boats that you can get on to, um, ride up and down the Pecos River in, in Carlsbad. Um, there are 90 homes that are lit up. All the boats are decorated. Um, this is, I mean this is, I think this is worth driving to Carlsbad for, and in fact, what I read on their site was that, um, over 60% of the 12,000 people who come to visit are from elsewhere. So it’s a huge, huge display of lights and holiday cheer. And I gotta tell you, hopefully Carlsbad is not going to be as chilly as Santa Fe is gonna be this week. There are a couple of other things you can do. Sky Railway in Santa Fe is still running their Polito, the Dragon Train rides. There are none available for the 23rd and the 24th, but today, the 20th, the 21st and the 22nd, you can still get tickets to ride Sky Railway. There are tickets available through the afternoon of December 22nd. We’ll provide a link to that. Um, some of the other things… hang on just a second. I’m gonna tell you about them. I don’t know what you have planned for the rest of the week, but if you are in Farmington, you can watch a Christmas Carol at the Convention Center on Christmas Eve. If you happen to be in Albuquerque, there are, there are two really cool things happening. I’m gonna tell you about a third that’s not publicized, but you don’t wanna miss it.

Bunny: (18:10)
Um, the river of lights at the bio park goes through the end of the month. Um, the only nights that they aren’t doing it are December 24th and 25th. And if you’ve never been, it’s at the, what, what they call the bio park. It’s the botanical gardens, is how I think of it. And it is this crazy light show that you won’t believe that you walk through. It’s not expensive at all. So we’ve included a a link to that. Um, another thing to do on Christmas Eve is go to Old Town. Um, there are lots and lots of what they’re gonna call in Albuquerque Luminar and what I grew up thinking. Now, paper sack of course with can sand and candles nestled in the sand to light the way. Um, in Santa Fe we call those Farolitos. So don’t get mixed up if you’re in Santa Fe and you’re going to do the Canyon Road Walk, um, which will also include a link to that. they call those bags with candles. Farolitos Luminarias in north north of Albuquerque are little bonfires. And when you do the Canyon Road Walk, which everybody needs to do once in their life, when you do that in Santa Fe, the the Luminar are these little bonfires that people build in front of their stores. Um, lots of merchants have, uh, and in front of their homes, lots of merchants have hot chocolate. Elfa roll will hopefully have the guy out back selling hot toddies and hot butter drums. Um, and if, and if walking around isn’t your sort of thing, um, think about going to, um, between now and Christmas at least, um, through the 22nd, um, Santa Fe Desert Corral is doing, um, what they call a ceremony of carols. And some of them, let’s see on, I’m gonna tell you. So, so here’s one of the coolest things on the 20th and the 21st and the 22nd of December.

Bunny: (20:28)
Those performances are in the Cathedral basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. That is the large cathedral that you see when you’re downtown Santa Fe. Listen, you may not love Baroque carols, um, but you may. Um, but here’s what you should, should know. The voices are amazing and the cathedral lit up for a Christmas concert is beyond amazing. So don’t miss that. Here’s another cool thing that’s gonna be happening. I’m, and I’m, I’m, and I’m sorry for you folks who aren’t gonna be in Santa Fe. I just, I did a long search of events that are happening. We will be excited to get your comments and share other ideas. But on the 21st, which is the Winter Solstice, the Candy Man, which is our local music store, is having, um, what they call a nationwide celebration of Make Music Winter. And it is in their description, they say they’re gonna gather around the fire pit on the Candyman porch and, um, for a family friendly event to celebrate the joyous winter solstice. And that’s from two to 4:00 PM The Candy Man’s piano and vocal teacher is gonna lead a singing circle activity with favorite Christmas carols. And, um, you’re gonna get, if you attend a free rhythm shaker and enjoy free hot cocoa and apple cider, if you haven’t been to the Candyman, um, go in, they’re gonna make you wanna buy. Uh, it’s, it’s amazing. You’re gonna wanna buy a ukulele or a guitar or some sort of an, a musical instrument because it’s just such a cool place to hang out. And, um, there’s also a, a night at the Opera on December 24th, which is Christmas Eve at the Lindsay Theater. Um, all the opera at the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Singers will be performing. And, if you’ve never been to the Lens, it’s Johanna and I just went to see The Nutcracker there, and it is a restored old movie theater in downtown Santa Fe, and it’s pretty amazing.

Bunny: (22:42)
But, um, there’s also this way cool event going on right now at, um, expo New Mexico, which is a, both a drive-through and a walkthrough light show. We’re gonna include a link to that. That’s the state fairgrounds for those of you who still think of it as that. And, um, the people who have been say it’s, it’s such a surprise and it’s so much fun. So don’t miss that. And finally, just for fun, those of you who grew up in the eighties and nineties, um, on December 22nd and 23rd, you can watch the classic, the Cult film, grim Lungs at the Gene Koto Cinema. We had those guys on the podcast about three weeks ago. They’re always doing something fun and, um, you know, you’re gonna want to do that. Come on. So let me think of anything else. Well, if you’re in Santa Fe, go to Santa fe.com to catch any other events. You know, like the Bishop’s Lodge on Monday the 26th is having, um, a mission wine tasting event. Those of you who are in New Mexico visiting, um, check out the website for the city or the town that you’re visiting. Hopefully you can find something fun to do and if not, um, try this, especially if you’re in Albuquerque. One of the things that my family and I always did was we went to the cemetery, I’m sorry I can’t think of the name of it, but it is at Edith and Menual Street. And many times I got to go there with my friend Joe Lynn, who had two family members buried there. And we spent Christmas Eve decorating the graves with Luminar and lights and wreaths. And then we went back at night to take a look. It’s the most, um, it’s just one of the most new Mexican ways to spend Christmas other than at home with your family in front of the fire, enjoying the holiday season. I’m so glad you guys were here today. I know this is a little disjointed just because we had so many different things we wanted to talk about, and I had stories I wanted to tell. I also meant to do some recipes. So maybe we’ll just include links to a good Bisco, Chito recipe and Paoli, which you’re gonna need to, to have for Christmas Eve and for New Year’s Day. So, um, happy holidays everybody. Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate Christmas and, and happy Hanukah to those who who celebrate that. I’m so happy to be in New Mexico for Christmas this year for the holidays. So take care. I can’t wait to hear from you.