a note to our friends and loved ones

Dearest Loved Ones,

We all start out these letters every year with that inevitable glance backwards over shoulders that have carried the burdens of the past 365 days, and we all wonder where that time went, now so much water under the bridge of memory. For us, the year has had a peculiar heft to it, and as we draw to the close of 2010, our shoulders still feel the gravity of some of those amazing memories.

We have gained and lost so much this year--March saw us birthing our sixth beautiful baby into the world, completing the circle of our family in a dramatic way, while June and September stole from us a beloved great-great-grandmother and great-grandfather. Autumn gave us the gift of a cherished new closeness to a brother and sister-in-law, while October marked the beginning of the grandest and riskiest adventure of our family's small history, when we moved out of our rented home in a search for the ultimate irony: the open road and a permanent home, all at the same time. Two months, two national borders, scores of national parks and landmarks, and seven states later, we're inching ever closer to that elusive dream of home, thoroughly worn by the excitement of all the fantastic places we've visited since we last left our door jamb in the last week of October. The next few days, crammed in just before the last day of this momentous year, should see us crossing a whole new door jamb, our 5 acres in the forest where we will, Lord willing, hang our hearts and our hats, and the hats of our children and our children's children and beyond.

This new place represents so much for our family; it is an old house where we can get our elbows greasy with remodeling and renovating; we will bring home our very first family dog, and we will have room for the boys to grow into the spectacular young men they are already becoming. It's a place for Bonnie's artistic skills to blossom, for us all to get our fingernails dirty and grow something, to maybe bring to fruition (literally and figuratively) our dream of having a sustainable mini-agriculture of our own, a not-so-urban homestead community to share with friends and family. It's a place to re-learn the precious skill of spreading our wings after so long being confined to small spaces not our own, a place to begin to repay all the oceans of hospitality that have been visited upon us by those dearest to us during our time of wandering. It's a place of roots. It's a place to finally come home to.

There has been a song running like a soundtrack in my mind for the past couple of months, since this journey started, really. It sums up so tidily all that we've experienced and what it means for our family, and I have played it many, many times during the dark parts of our journey when we've been reminded that adventures by necessity require peril, and disappointment, and sometimes failure thrown in with the excitement and awe and amazement. It's a song by Rob Thomas called Little Wonders, and the chorus still raises a lump in my throat: "Our lives are made in these small hours; these little wonders--these twists and turns of fate. Time falls away, but these small hours, these small hours still remain." There's another Rob Thomas song that always facetiously comes back to memory at those moments, too..."I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell, I know, right now you can't tell..." But maybe the most potent song of all running through the soundtrack of our family's conscious this past year is that ever-blowing spirit-wind that always brings change in ways we can never fully foresee and rarely understand. And while our shoulders have creaked under the weight of transformation from time to time, our feet have also gotten caught up in that irresistible dance, and we have felt lighter than ever in the middle of our great heaviness. I guess we've found our ultimate irony in more ways than one.

We want to thank each of you who have extended yourselves to care for our family in the middle of the crazy--you have fed us, or sheltered us, or given us encouragement, or been a friend to us, and we deeply love you and are so, so grateful. There is no way, really, that we can repay the love and grace we've been extended, so we try to content ourselves on the wise words of the apostle Paul, who penned, "Pay your debts as they come due. However, one debt you can never finish paying is the debt of love that you owe each other."

And we owe you big-time. Merry Christmas!

--The Bozeman Family
Christopher, Teri, Bonnie, Ben, Isaac, Gabriel, Elisha, & Asa.

empty underneath

I'm tired.

I'm tired of bing puked on by the Spirit-Of-Christmas-Eternal.

Tired of having exactly 7.5 minutes to revel in the contrived fuzzy feelings of Thanksgiving before it's time to rush headlong into the next holiday.

Tired of the pressure to find-the-perfect-gift because that's somehow a measure of my love for the people in my life.

Tired of MeMeMeMeMeMe.

Tired of stocking stuffers and Black Friday and 3-story yard ornaments and the talking box in the living room telling me that everyone is happy and joyful and all robed in crimson ya-yas.

My family checked out of the Christmas crazies years ago, and every year, as the beehive of humanity lights up ever brighter with the frenzy of the season, I am more and more glad we did it. But I've been relatively quiet about it until now, and while I know that a lot of you will not be interested to hear what I have to say, somebody out there needs to be speaking out about what I saw when I began to take a peek behind the glittered veil of Christmastide.

Okay, so here's the challenge. Every scrap of advertising we all see from 2 months before Thanksgiving until the day after New Year's tells us all about the joy of the Christmas season, about how happy we all are while buying stuff and coveting stuff and making our Christmas lists and hosting parties and shopping shopping shopping. Are we really that happy? Is this really what it's all about this season? So think about these things the next time you're out:

*At the grocery store, all those people shopping for holiday foods for parties and gatherings...count how many people you see that look happy. How many smile? How many are in good moods? Are you?

*In the parking lot, how many people are giving up their front-row parking spots for little old ladies? How many people are smiling? How many people aren't in a mad rush? How many are enjoying the weather?

*At the department store, how polite is everyone? How polite are you? Are you feeling the love here?

*At the post office, how many people are happy and chatty while standing in line? How many look at you and smile?

Okay, so for some perspective.

*At the grocery store, how many people are scowling? In a mad rush? Frustrated with and yelling at the kids on whom they'll be lavishing hundreds of dollars of gifts in just a few days?

*In the parking lot, how happy does the Sally Army bell-ringer look as 3/4 of the people pass by without giving a donation? How many people are cutting each other off and cutting in for the best parking spot? How many people leave their baskets for someone else to deal with?

*In the department store, how many people are dragging their precious children along, exhausted and stressed to the hilt, to buy the *perfect gift* for someone else? How many cashiers look bored stiff and utterly apathetic?

*At the post office, how many people are standing, impatient and bored at the same time, overladen with gaudy packages to send off to people who will hate what they recieve and look for the first chance to take them back to the store?

*Finally, at home. How much time have you spent looking for that perfect gift? How much money did you spend, and did you even have it to spend, and if you did, was it really worth it? Will your family love you more because you bought them some pretty thing? Is that the best measure of your love?

We spend a lot of energy on this holiday. We spend a lot of time rationalizing that it's the season of joy and of giving and of spending time together.

How much of that joy would be left if the Christmas tree was empty underneath?

--Teri.