The Saintmaker’s Christmas Eve: The Castillo brothers are artists in the craft of saintmaking—curing, carving, plastering, and painting dead wood into lifelike statues of God’s blessed ones. As boys, the brothers received this talent from a Franciscan friar, who saw in them the capacities to wield it well.

The brothers were fashioned by God to constitute, between them, that which it took to make a work of faith, which was the same thing as saying a work of art. Roberto had the eye, the swift and careful hand, to see what lay hidden in a stick of wood and to carve it free; while Carlos had the patient and musing joy to work by measure, like an apothecary, and never by the flash of certainty that comes from nowhere.

Christmas 1809: Roberto Castillo sets forth for the village of San Cristóbal, in New Mexico’s Rio Grande valley, with a statue of their patron to be installed and venerated at the Midnight Mass. It is the brothers’ masterpiece: St. Christopher bearing on his shoulder the holy Christ Child. Upon his return home, Roberto greets his brother, not with the payment for their labor, but with strange, miraculous tidings.

Told with tenderness and great suspense, and illustrated with eighteen fine drawings by the author, The Saintmaker’s Christmas Eve tells with imaginative fire and frank humility the miracle of Christmas: God’s mercy, made incarnate for all peoples.

Paul Horgan (1903–1995) was an American Catholic historian and novelist, praised by David McCullough as “a writer of large vision and many-sidedness” with a matchless “command of language and feeling for human nature.” Author of forty-plus books, Horgan received two Pulitzer Prizes and the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal.