Christmas with the Deer Dancers, Part 1

last year at this time we were in New Mexico, visiting friends recently moved to the mountains near Grants.  on Christmas Day G and i left our friends, one having to go in to work and one desperately sick with a bad cold, to go to Acoma Pueblo for the dances.  we were too late to catch a shuttle up the mesa, so we climbed up on foot in the bitter cold.  the ancient adobe church of San Esteban del Rey was cleared of chairs, though Indians who had come from the village to watch had brought their own folding seats and were arrayed around the edges of what was now a beaten earth dancing floor.  soon we heard bells, drums and chanting coming from deep in the crooked alleyways of the town, and the procession of dancers slowly wended its way towards the church plaza.  the Christmas dances in the Pueblos of northern New Mexico are the Deer Dances, one of the many totem animal dances performed throughout the year.  the dancers wear evergreen boughs attached to legs, arms, and coming down over their faces like a mask. they wear antlers, hold sticks in their hands which function as the deer's front legs.  they wear bells and skins and all manner of things hanging from belts.  the effect is of deer dancing through a forest of evergreens.  it is magical and ancient.  they dance into the church, then dance there in the center of the watchers, in front of the nativity scene up on the altar, in a stirring mixture of the pagan and the christian. 

the magic of the Solstice is present in the totem of the deer  (think 8 tiny reindeer, where did that come from?  yes!), the figure of the shaman (the origins of santa claus), the evergreen branches (symbolic down thru the ages of life springing eternal even in the depths of winter), the bells again call up the figure of the shaman, the one who can communicate between the worlds of the human and the spirit.  and all of this presented to the figure of the Baby Jesus in his manger-crib on the altar in the dark smoke-smelling church.  the dancers then go back out to the plaza and dance around the fire that the tribal elders are tending through the day and night.