The Garden

December 25, 2023

Massive, snow-covered Pikes Peak soars skyward 14,100 feet above the chain of mountains running north-south and just west of Colorado Springs. The Garden of the Gods, north of town, serves as a placesetting for the view of the peak, and the rough cast of nature that abides around us today, on Christmas morning.

We walked through the Garden last week, getting a spray of afternoon sun after two days of bitter white winter in southeast Colorado. The sun offered weak warmth, but the craggy red sandstone formations cast deep shadows that held the chill.

Our daughter Kathleen had graduated from nursing school that morning. It was a time for celebrating, even through the onslaught of Christmas. The Garden was, for some mysterious reason, the right stopping point.

The geological formations like the Steamboat Rock, Three Graces, and Balanced Rock and the others tell a strange story of geological upheaval eons ago. Archeologists believe ancient peoples passed through the area some 1,300 years B.C, a split-second ago in the life of the planet. Native Americans entered the Garden region roughly around 250 years B.C. Apache, Commanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Lakota, Shawnee, and others hunted and lived in or near the area.

The six of us strolled past the giant sandstone towers, tiptoeing, sometimes sliding across the icy patches, hunching our shoulders against the cold. The bizarre, majestic structures rule this patch of nature, close to the city yet exploding from another time. Those early peoples lived here then died or moved on, long before what we know as the Christmas Miracle, the transcendent moment of Christ’s birth as recorded in the Christian gospels. 

A few miles south the city, like every other in the Western world, was festooned with decorative lights, the stores scrambling to lure the final-week shoppers, the churches frantically advertising, hoping to fill pews for the big day. The breakneck commercial rituals of Christmas attempt to draw us in, the excitable and joyful, the weary and disillusioned. As every year a few oldsters protest they don’t want or need anything. They still will get a pair of gloves, a sweater, a new cell phone or other technology gizmo, or the last resort, a restaurant gift card.

A day earlier we had walked through the giant Broadmoor resort hotel/country club, which sits in a Colorado Springs residential neighborhood with its moats and golf course. The attraction, in the main building, is a gingerbread boat lined with candy, and gaily decorated Christmas trees. A chilling, ghostly fog, the aftereffect of the midweek snow squall, hung over the place. We wandered through the main building, warming ourselves by giant gas-fed fireplaces.

The wide and high corridors show off vintage cowboy-and-Indian oil paintings that trace the rich roughneck history of Colorado, far more interesting than the gingerbread boat. We crossed a concrete curved bridge that poked through the fog at an auxiliary building that housed an expensive shop selling cowboy gear. 

Sandy and I had visited in 1979 for a business meeting, the place looked vaguely familiar, although the prices were a lot higher. We were a mismatch for the place then and still are now. The Broadmoor is one of those grand old hotels that drown guests in pricey luxury; we learned a palatial home on the property rents for $10,000 per night. I wondered why here, in Colorado Springs?

The town, population just under a half-million, is home to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, Air Force Academy and, nearby, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex and Peterson Air Force Base, home to the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD. The folks who work at those places aren’t the Broadmoor’s target clientele.

Tourists, including us, swarmed across the thick carpets and lounged on sofas near the main entrance. The resort had opened its doors to locals interested in seeing the gingerbread boat, the decorated trees, and scattered other Christmas trappings.

It could have been me, it could have been the weather, but the holiday spirit seemed contrived. A crowd gawked at the garishly decorated pastries in the display case of a coffee shop. The coffee was expensive, everything was expensive.

The Broadmoor and Garden visits were a week ago. The commercial rampage of Christmas then still seemed far off, obscured, at least in my head, by our existence at the fringes of the political, economic, and the “social-media” world.  But we hauled out our tarnished Advent Wreath and the four candles, three purple, one pink, which count down the four weeks of the spiritual content of the season. We did the daily Gospel readings and lit the candles at dinner, we sent cards. Finally we picked up a few things for those close to us.

The Colorado junket was over too quickly. Although we rode to the Pikes Peak summit two years ago, it begs for a repeat; we didn’t get there. The famous Manitou Incline of something like 2,700 steps, on the east side of the Peak is another target, you can’t get to the top without acclimating to the elevation. We’ve never been there long enough.

We were left with our tranquil stroll through the Garden of the Gods in the winter sunlight and bracing chill—not a Christmas light or garland in sight. The rough edges of the place carried to us the brooding mystery of its origins and its past, its raw bluntness. The pocked sandstone, gnarled and unpretty, conveys the brutality and beauty of our world naked of pretense, leaving us with a sense of truth, that is, immortality, which could be the truth of Christmas.