The first Saturday in July happens to be designated St. John Maximovitch day in America. Since that’s the name day of Fr. John of Holy Trinity, he celebrates it with a Liturgy. As it happens, pretty much everything in Orthodoxy is celebrated with a Liturgy; that seems to be the most celebratory possible thing to do, at least liturgically. Among other things Orthodox like doing on their name days is eating and visiting monasteries, so we did both, and had a Liturgy and cookout at Saint Michael’s Skete, which is some hour and a half north of Santa Fe. I ended up going up with a woman who had grown up between the Skete and Santa Fe, and was a fount of information on the people, places, and geographical idiosyncrasies of the area. The landscape looked exactly like you would imagine
it to, going by landscape paintings and books on Georgia O’Keef. As I didn’t bring a camera, here are some fairly representative (though lacking in summer thunderstorm lighting) pictures of the Skete and surrounding area from their website.

From St. Michael's website; view from the skete

The iconostasis in St Michael's Chapel

The chapel dome (isn't it adorable?)

The guest house (our cookout was out in front of there)

Chapel and surrounding barreness (actually, it's rather more lush than it appears at first sight, because there's a stream going through the property)

Black Mesa, which is apparently fairly significant. This photo is from Wikipedia commons, but fairly representative of what we could see from the road.

Anyway, it was fun, even if there were no fireworks, flags, or patriotic music involved at any point.