One frigidly cold night at Bent’s Old Fort out on the nearly deserted plains of Southeast Colorado, it was 12° in the plaza. It was the celebration of Christmas and the fort was decorated with evergreen boughs brought down from the mountains and hung on all the post holding up the second story deck. There were ribbons and Christmas decorations in the various rooms and the festive feelings of the holidays were everywhere. Under the empty cloudless sky brimming with stars whose light did little to provide warmth, log fires burned around the grounds valiantly trying to keep the cold away and provide light. It worked if you stood right up next to the fires, so close you risked setting yourself on fire, but at the time that didn’t seem like a bad idea. It was the annual Christmas Festival at the fort and the crowds filling up the central plaza hadn’t been there long enough to let the cold seep into their bones.

Shadows of the people casually milling around the open plaza were cast up onto the towering adobe walls. Mountain men and women carrying lanterns with candles inside kept tours of guests moving from one room to the next as their various occupants within explained their jobs, their lives, and how things were when the fort was in use back in the early 1800’s.

The rooms quickly filled up as the groups entered and clustered together for warmth. As the rooms were not heated in many cases, the more people gathered together the better and warmer it felt. Some places had small adobe fireplaces in the rooms that gave off heat as long as you kept them stoked with the split wood that appeared to be in endless supply. For some reason it took the tours a little longer to go through those heated rooms than the ones that were unheated.

There was one place however that was very popular. The Blacksmith shop. The roaring fire in the forge, the ringing of the hammer against the anvil, the lanterns hung about with their glowing dancing candlelight, the gathering groups of people all eager to soak up the warmth of the shop. Many questions were asked of the blacksmith and his assistant, so many in fact that the tour leaders had to move one group out so the next could enter. It was amazing how much folks wanted to know about the art of blacksmithing especially when someone would open the door letting that refreshing 12° air into the room. The door would quickly be shut and the blacksmith would pull the chain on the huge bellows and the fire in the forge would come roaring back to life again shooting sparks up the adobe brick chimney like a Roman candle.

The project in the shop that evening was creating delicate hammered iron hooks, hand-fashioned and bent and pounded into shape by the skilled hands of the blacksmith. Knowing the exact color needed in the heated metal rods he would pull them out of the fire, place them on the anvil and strike with his small heavy hammer until they were formed exactly as he needed them to be. The process was fascinating. It was mesmerizing and almost hypnotic watching the gorgeous red metal slowly fade to a darker shade until it had to be placed back in the forge and be reheated.

The Christmas Festival at Bent’s Old Fort was a wonderful event. After a while the crowds seemed to forget about the cold as the warmth of the season and the good fellowship of the folks sharing their love of the fort and its history spread throughout the plaza. All of the guests seemed to have a great time and enjoyed immensely the atmosphere of a treasured part of history. If you get the opportunity to attend the Christmas Festival at Bent’s Old Fort don’t miss it, the memories will stay with you forever.