Pilgrims travel this path. They come from as far away as Albuquerque… The path travels through Sante Fe, where hand-carved wooden santos go in the galleries for $300, $500, a thousand bucks a pop to visitors from Manhattan, Seattle, and Berlin; where pictures of Pueblo medicine men are more popular than the velvet Jesuses hawked by vendors along the road to Chimayo; on to Española, low-rider capital of America, where on Good Friday, to celebrate the end of Lent, Mary rides three inches off the ground in a glitter green 1965 Chevy Impala…

People go to Chimayo to eat dirt. They pray to more gods than you can count on two hands. They believe that a paper mache baby doll decked out in garb appropriate to 18th-century Prague is in all actuality El Santo Niño, that this baby doll leaves a neighboring church built just for him every night and wears his shoes out wandering the countryside. They believe this so much they bring him baby shoes; for years, a woman who lived next door kept a supply on hand for those who forgot.

We’ve come down to the wire. It’s actually 2 in the morning on Christmas Eve, and if you’re anything like me at all, you just sprung into action with an, “OH FUCK!” and a “Why did I wait!?” If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you should be more than halfway through your mixtape (cd). Or, in reality, you could have just made it in like, 15 minutes. Whatever the case may be, here are my final 6 suggestions for your holiday mixtape (cd).

“Nude” by Radiohead from the album In Rainbows

I just like this song. It’s pretty. Also, the album is amazing. The really cool thing about In Rainbows was the unprecedented sales plan. If you recall (or if you don’t), the band chose to make the album available via its website for whatever fans were willing to pay. While there were certainly those who paid the bare minimum, I read that the average paid price was $6. In the end, the album became available physically, but the idea remained cool. Plus, Radiohead is awesome.

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[**The latest rumors... suggest CCA will be saved, at least for the time being, though a fat annual, anonymous pledge and a decently sized one-time gift. Oh, the drama. Sources in the know acknowledge the generosity of the current pledges, but suggest that CCA's impressive debt can't be touched without significantly more generosity. Thus the question: Postponing the inevitable? If so, why? Lots of other organizations that aren't on the verge of folding could use the boon...]

Rumors confirmed: A press release issued late on Wednesday, Dec. 30 confirmed that CCA will continue operations “after a brief hiatus.” John S. Gordon, formerly a board member, will take over from Lea Rekow as executive director in an interim, pro bono capacity.

The news that Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Art will be permanently closing its doors as a special New Year’s gift really pisses me off.

I guess I could be sad–like, that sucks–but I feel genuinely betrayed. First, I have a dog in the hunt, having served as executive director to the organization in the 1990s. Second, CCA has been radio silent as far as I’m concerned in terms of real community voice in the last couple of years.

Didn’t we just rally as a community and save KSFR’s ass? I realize it would be tiresome in the extreme to bail out CCA (again), but shouldn’t we have had the option?

I’m sure some at CCA believe the organization is having an honorable, profound and somewhat inevitable death, but it’s all bullshit to me.

At the end of the day, if CCA hadn’t decided to alienate itself from the community, ie, its roots, the community wouldn’t have allowed it to die.

SFR’s year-end issue has a brief overview of how New Mexico and Santa Fe County fared economically in 2009. The short answer is, worse than was reported.

Here’s a little holiday bonus: Background research. These cold numbers may be small consolation if you’re among the unemployed, or the employed-but-broke, but then again, at least you’ll know you’re not alone.

The map below links to the New York Fed’s nationwide “credit conditions” data, where you can see how Santa Feans are doing when it comes to repaying their credit cars, student loans and mortgages on time.

But wait, there’s more.

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‘Twas the last second before Christmas, and all through your life were people intelligent enough to appreciate poetry books as a last-second/belated Christmas/Hanukkah/New Years/Christmas-season birthday present. Man, you have a cool entourage!

Personally, I think poetry books are some of the best gifts at any time of the year. I am, of course, biased, because I majored in poetry at the College of Santa Fe and could read poetry every second for the rest of my life and be perfectly happy as a clam. But poetry is indeed the gift that keeps on giving; give someone a novel and they’ll read it and perhaps like it, then (hopefully) pass it on to someone else to (hopefully) enjoy. But poetry is different in that you can pick up a poem on a Tuesday and it means one thing—pick it up Thursday it means another—or Sunday, yet another. It keeps being interesting.

So here are my picks for a few great poetry books to give (and receive!) this holiday season… Or any season, really.

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