Cowboy Christmas

Believe it or not, I did not see a professional rodeo until I traveled to Cody, Wyoming to search for a cowboy to feature in Cowboy Christmas. I’m not even sure why I was attracted to the subject of rodeo and rodeo cowboys.

I had heard country songs about rodeo—“Amarillo by Morning” by George Strait maybe the most famous—and I had become fascinated with the romanticism of rodeos, and our romantic idea of what a cowboy was, and is. Somewhere along the line, around 2006 maybe, a friend who had heard me talking about rodeo alerted me to an article in USA Today titled “Cowboy Christmas”. It described how four men left their jobs, their families and relationships and piled into a pickup truck together to travel the Cowboy Christmas rodeo circuit. Immediately, I became more fascinated with what drove these men—and all the other rodeo men and women—to give up so much for this sport.

As a writer, and a teacher of writing, I knew there are reasons for the motivations of characters in works of fiction, and that this was true in real life. I wanted to know those reasons for the cowboys, I wanted to create a character studies about rodeo cowboys. I applied for a grant from Southern Illinois University where I teach, and received one in 2008. That summer, I saw my first pro rodeo in Cody, Wyoming, as I began my search for a cowboy and his buddies to feature in the doc. And I found them, all of them fascinating characters, with multi-faceted lives and varied reasons for rodeoing.

In the summer of 2009, my small crew and I drove to Texas to begin our trek of capturing our cowboys on their treks through the Western states. During that first week in Texas, I really learned about the passion these men have for the sport. I also saw in my life a parallel passion to theirs: filmmaking. They can’t quit rodeo even when they’re not winning or not winning a lot. Independent filmmakers can’t quit making films, videos, media of any kind, even if our film isn’t getting into as many festivals as we want. Our passion for making media work is very similar to their passion for participating in rodeo. In fact, any artist’s passion for his or her work is very similar to the rodeo cowboy’s passion for his sport.

Besides the passion of the participants, I was also struck about how deeply rooted rodeo is in the American West and Southwest. I was surprised to find high school rodeo teams, college rodeo teams, amateur rodeos, and semi-pro rodeos. In professional rodeo, women only compete in barrel racing, but in every other rodeo, women and girls compete in a variety of events. I discovered the importance of rodeos to small towns and their economies, some of which we touch upon in Cowboy Christmas but could be a documentary unto itself.

The richness of rodeo life, and the diversity of the people involved in rodeo, actually could fill a documentary series. Maybe someday someone will do that. In the meantime, I hope that I have opened a corral door on this uniquely American subculture and allowed audiences to see themselves in these cowboys as they—and we all—follow our passions as we move on down the road.