December 25 25 Newsletter | Take the Back Roads

 This newsletter was originally sent on December 25, 2025

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

📬 Want these updates in your inbox? Subscribe here.

An empty road leading into the fading light, where the horizon meets the quiet promise of the journey ahead

Welcome, Friends, 

to News from the Back Roads!

Dear friends,

This Christmas, I find myself thinking less about celebration and more about presence.

So much of this season—Advent especially—is about waiting. Waiting in quiet churches. Waiting in half-lit streets. Waiting with stories, with memories, with questions that don’t resolve neatly. Waiting, even at midnight, knowing the hours are still long but trusting that light will come anyway.

Much of what I’ve written this year has lived in that space.

On back roads and in old museums. Among forgotten names and well-worn books. In cemeteries that refuse to stay silent and stories that insist on being remembered. Again and again, I keep returning to the same truth: what is sacred rarely arrives with spectacle. It arrives quietly. In ordinary places. In human stories. In care taken with what the world is quick to discard.

That is, after all, the heart of Christmas.

Not a triumphal story, but an incarnational one. God choosing closeness. Choosing humility. Choosing to arrive where people are tired, overlooked, or uncertain, and calling that place holy.

Whether you approach this season through faith, tradition, memory, or simple wonder, my hope is that you find moments of stillness in it. Moments to notice. Moments to remember. Moments where the long wait feels, just briefly, worth it.

Thank you for walking these roads with me this year. For reading, reflecting, and remembering alongside me.

May your Christmas be gentle, grounded, and quietly bright, and may the roads ahead hold more grace than hurry.

With gratitude,

a.d. elliott

Art and Other Odd Adventures

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.





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