December 20 25 Newsletter | Take the Back Roads

 This newsletter was originally sent on December 20, 2025

Each month, I share new essays, books, and stories from the road.

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Welcome, Friends,  to News from the Back Roads! Dear friends, This week’s newsletter arrives in the quiet space just before Christmas, the pause between remembering where we’ve been and considering what still lies ahead. In these final days of Advent, the stories we tell tend to slow down. They turn inward. They ask us to look honestly at childhood, conscience, sacrifice, and the weight we carry, whether from history, belief, service, or silence. This week, we wander through American nostalgia at the Daisy Airgun Museum, sit with the early Church through The Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians, honor the life and service of Sergeant Larry Gene Hogan, and peer into the unsettling psychology of The Silent Patient. These are not light stories—but they are meaningful ones. Each, in its own way, asks us to pay attention. As Christmas approaches, may these reflections remind us that stillness, memory, and truth are often where the most important journeys begin. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night. a.d. elliott Art and Other Odd Adventures

Stories Found Along the Way

A Red Ryder Christmas: Visiting the Daisy Airgun Museum in Arkansas This week, Fish and I wandered into a small museum in Rogers, Arkansas, that costs just two dollars to enter and somehow holds an entire century of American boyhood inside its walls.  A visit to the Daisy Airgun Museum became a quiet Christmas reflection on Red Ryders, childhood, and what it means to learn trust by experience. Some places preserve artifacts. Others preserve ways of being. → Read the full reflection on TakeTheBackRoads.com

Another Book in the Bucket

Bucket List Book #516 - The First Epistle of Clement: Order, Authority, and the Early Christian Church Bucket List Book Adventure #516 takes us back to the very early Church with The First Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians. Written around AD 96, this letter confronts pride, disorder, and the temptation to abandon tradition, concerns that feel surprisingly familiar.  Clement writes not as a distant authority, but as a shepherd, reminding the Church that faith is not something we reinvent in every generation. It is something we receive, protect, and hand on.  Reading this epistle, one can’t help but wonder how much of early Christian worship would still feel like home today. → Read the full review on RiteOfFancy.com

Building a Veteran-Ready Business: Smart Hiring and Retention Strategies for Small Business Owners - Guest Post by Hazel Bridges from Aging Wellness. Org This week’s site update includes a guest essay that helps small business owners better understand how to hire and retain veterans in civilian workplaces. The piece outlines practical ways to translate military experience into civilian roles, reduce onboarding friction, and build mission-driven teams where veterans can thrive. It’s a straightforward resource for employers interested in veteran-ready hiring practices. Read the article here.

A Story of Service Sergeant Larry Gene Hogan, A Marine's Story This week’s Everyday Patriot honors Sergeant Larry Gene Hogan, a U.S. Marine who served for more than a decade and deployed aboard USS Jason during the Gulf War.  His service unfolded far from the headlines, and his story is one of the many reminders that war’s cost isn’t always measured on the battlefield, but in the lives and names we choose to remember. Read More

A Fun Read For the Road The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides - When the Therapist Is the Most Unsettling Character This week on Rite of Fancy, I read The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. It’s the kind of psychological thriller you know you shouldn’t stare at too long, but you do anyway. Compulsively readable and deeply uncomfortable, what disturbed me most wasn’t the crime, but the therapist himself. Some stories entertain. Others leave a bruise. This one did both. Read More

From the Studio Wall

Bridal Veil at Seven Falls  a.d. elliott, Take the Back Roads Available in the shop!  Bridal Veil at Seven Falls captures water falling softly over snow-dusted stone in Colorado’s winter hush. A reminder, in this final week before Christmas, that not everything meaningful arrives on a schedule. Photograph by  a.d. elliott  available at shop.takethebackroads.com

If any of these stories offered you a moment of reflection or a gentle breath this week, I hope you’ll share them with a fellow traveler — of roads, books, or life.