Christmas

Christmas is both a religious season and a practical deadline in Lizzy Enders’s life at the Santa Fe convent. Its approach gathers the school around Advent observances and familiar holiday preparations, while the unfinished chapel staircase makes the date a test of time, faith, and human effort. When the staircase is completed and its carpenter disappears, the season acquires the force of a miracle for the convent community, though Lizzy Enders remains unconvinced that the carpenter was Saint Joseph.

A Deadline for the Staircase

The staircase project becomes inseparable from Christmas because the school hopes the chapel will be ready for the feast. When the Bishop agrees to pause the work for a week after appeals from the girls and Elinora, the delay puts that hope at risk. José explains that the staircase will not be finished by Christmas if the work stops; he cannot simply wait without earning food, and must look for other work. The approaching feast is therefore not merely a date on the school calendar. It gives the building project urgency and makes the consequences of the girls’ petition tangible.

For Lizzy Enders, the unfinished staircase also carries a private emotional weight. She wants José to complete it because she believes his beautiful work would have made Mrs. Lacey happy. When Sister Roberta gently points out that Lizzy sounds as if she believes in the carpenter, Lizzy makes clear that she wants both the staircase and its maker to finish the work for Mrs. Lacey. The Christmas deadline thus becomes bound up with grief and the wish to give someone she loves a source of happiness. The project is a material structure, but to Lizzy it also represents a hope that cannot be separated from loss.

Advent and the Convent’s Preparations

After Saint Joseph has not appeared, the girls settle back into routine, chastened and perhaps embarrassed by their expectation. Mother Magdalena repeatedly tells them at breakfast that they have not been worthy of him and that Advent is the season in which they must prepare themselves for the coming of Jesus. Lizzy, a Methodist, privately takes comfort in the fact that the girls do not truly expect Jesus to arrive in person. Her response marks her distance from the school’s Catholic belief without removing her from the season’s daily life.

Meanwhile, José works inside the chapel at an exhausting pace. The hammering continues as he starts at six in the morning, stops for mass, and works again until late at night. Mother Magdalena tells the girls not to disturb him: he is in a race against time to finish the staircase for Christmas. With the carpenter back at work, the choir practices in the dining room rather than the chapel. Schoolrooms and convent spaces acquire decorations of bright wild holly berries, possum haw berries, and evergreens. Christmas preparation appears in work schedules, restrictions, music, and the changing rooms, not just in religious instruction.

The preparations also carry a local, communal character. At the Bishop’s farm, academy boys are permitted to help with the hog killing, and a day girl describes the Christmas Eve bonfire, where old hog bladders will be thrown into the flames and burst like cannon fire. Ramona is already planning the Christmas Day feast, while the marketplace seems full of trinkets for sale. These details set the convent’s celebration in its particular surroundings, with its own food, customs, and sounds, rather than presenting Christmas as an abstract observance.

A Holiday Measured Against Home

The season sharpens Lizzy’s sense of displacement. The trinkets in the marketplace bring back the previous Christmas at Uncle William’s house, when Mama and her father were with her and the family had a full house, gifts, and a tree. The contrast with her present life makes Santa Fe seem like another world, even another planet; she wonders where she will be the following year. Christmas, which might ordinarily promise a return to familiar family customs, instead emphasizes how uncertain her future is.

That separation gives the season’s preparations a double edge. Lizzy participates in convent life, studies, and does her chores, but her memories keep the earlier holiday present beside the current one. Later, as snow settles over the school, the choir practices Silent Night in the dining room. Lizzy sits by the parlor fire knitting a sweater for Elena, with Cleo at her feet, after tending to Ben. The domestic work and music lend the evening a sense of peace and anticipation, but Lizzy initially thinks the excitement is only about snow, a rare sight for the girls that will soon disappear in the sun.

Completion, Disappearance, and Belief

In that quietly expectant evening, Cleo suddenly rises, arches her back, and hisses. Lizzy, who says she has no faith in uncommon powers, feels certain that an unseen presence is near and offers assurance. She wonders whether it might be Mama or Mrs. Lacey, but does not settle on an identity. The moment remains a feeling rather than an explanation. Then Elinora bursts into the parlor with news that the staircase is finished: Ramona has gone to bring José his supper and found the work complete, but the carpenter has gone.

The completion answers the practical question posed by the Christmas deadline, while the carpenter’s unexplained departure intensifies the religious one. By the time Lizzy leaves, people have come in large numbers to see the staircase, and experts in wood say they know of no wood like it within hundreds of miles. The girls and nuns hold to their belief in a miracle. Asked how José could have built it so quickly, Lizzy says she does not know and suggests that perhaps he brought helpers into the church at night. The suggestion preserves a possible human explanation without claiming to prove one.

Christmas therefore brings the staircase to completion but does not resolve the meaning of its construction. For four months, the school and convent continue to believe that the carpenter was Saint Joseph; Lizzy has scoffed at that conclusion and ends by insisting that he was not Saint Joseph. The season holds both accounts in view: a community’s desire to recognize a miracle and a skeptical girl’s refusal to mistake uncertainty for proof. What Christmas confirms is that the work was finished in time—not who, or what, made its completion possible.