Winslow station (Arizona)

Winslow is an Amtrak train station at 501 East Second Street in Winslow, Navajo County, eastern Arizona. It is served daily by Amtrak's Southwest Chief between Chicago and Los Angeles. The Santa Fe Depot and La Posada Hotel Harvey House compound are the centerpiece of the La Posada Historic District (established 1992).

Architecture

The Santa Fe Railway was built in 1929, and the adjacent La Posada Hotel and Gardens was completed in 1930.

Both were designed by renowned architect Mary Jane Colter. She is the architect of various notable Fred Harvey Company buildings, including others at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and in New Mexico. She considered La Posada Hotel as her integrated interior/exterior masterpiece.

Hotel

La Posada Hotel, and the depot, combine elements of the Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture styles. Characteristic Colter designed features include shaded colonnades and arcades, restaurants, red clay tile roofs above massed stuccoed walls, courtyards and acres of gardens, custom furniture, and decorative wrought ironwork throughout. The hotel building had two main entrances, a southern one on train platform and a northern one on the street for local people and U.S. Route 66 travelers.

Las Posadas

Las Posadas is a novenario (nine days of religious observance) celebrated chiefly in Mexico and by Mexican-Americans in the Southwestern United States, beginning December 16 and ending December 24, on evenings (about 8 or 10 PM). , during which Mexican families participate in nightly Christmas processions that re-create the Holy Pilgrimage of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus on their way to Bethlehem

Etymology

Spanish for "lodging", or "accommodation"; it is said in plural because it is celebrated more than one day in that period. The nine-day novena represents the nine months of pregnancy, specifically the pregnancy of Mary carrying Jesus.

History

The ritual has been a tradition in Mexico for 400 years. Many Mexican holidays include dramatizations of original events, a tradition which has its roots in the ritual of Bible plays used to teach religious doctrine to a largely illiterate population in Europe as early as the 10th and 11th centuries. These plays lost favor with the Church as they became popularized with the addition of folk music and other non-religious elements, and were eventually banned; only to be re-introduced in the sixteenth century by two Spanish saints as the Christmas Pageant, a new kind of religious ceremony to accompany the Christmas holiday.