Rosaries for feast days

White is what the church wears when it has something to celebrate, and these are the pieces made in it. Christmas and Easter, the feasts of Our Lady, the Epiphany — and, because the same colour serves them, the days a family marks with a present: a first communion, a confirmation, a wedding.

If you are buying for one of those days, this is the shortest route to a piece that will be recognised as correct. Nobody has to explain a pale strand to a Portuguese grandmother. It is what she expects to see, and getting it right matters more here than being interesting.

They are not identical, and the differences are worth ten seconds of your time. One is almost entirely pale with a green note at every turn, and it is the lightest thing Claudia makes — a piece for a child rather than an adult. One carries a deep blue at each of the larger beads and a small enamelled figure at the centre, and it is the one people choose when the recipient prays in the same words their grandmother did. One ends in a cross carrying a row of small blue points and is the weightiest of the group; it is named for the title sailors prayed under, and it goes to people whose prayer is mostly about somebody else getting home. One is warm rather than cool and hangs its full length, made for the twelfth night when the kings arrive.

Every one of them is wire-linked: fifty-nine beads and more, each turned onto its own link and closed by hand, over the better part of a day at one bench in Contenças. None is remade. If you are choosing a gift and the piece matters more than the choice being reversible, that is the thing to know — when it goes, it is gone, and the next one will be different.