Today’s transmission is about how having fires in your home strengthens your stead.
Having a fire is literally primal. Your family will tend to gather around it. It will engage feelings of togetherness and home on a deep psychological level. Think of all the poetry and imagery around “the hearth,” i.e., the home fire.
But there’s another angle. Let’s talk about Household and Primary Production. These are both absolutely necessary permafamily concepts. We do not believe it is possible to familystead without them.
Household—the household is the home as an economic unit. It isn’t just a collection of friends. Real goods and services for family members and others are generated there. (by the way, hold is a word similar to stead. Household = housestead = homestead). The most obvious and most effective form of being a household is to engage in Primary Production.
Primary Production—the household directly produces goods that it consumes. It is magic for your family to experience enjoying something that the family has made. It is literally primal. Primary production can be as simple as cooking your family’s meals from raw ingredients. In its fullest forms it includes gardening, hunting, fishing, stock raising, egg production, milking, and other forms of production that you take all the way from ingredients in nature to final consumption.
The fire is a great form of primary production. You and your family can step in at any stage, or all stages. There is cutting trees, cutting the wood, moving it, making a good woodpile, splitting wood, gathering kindling from the chips, down to making the fire itself.
If you make the fire or chop the wood then you are engaged in primary production and the light and warmth your family experiences is binding them.
Make sure to point out to them how lucky your family is to experience these family fires.
One steader writes:
Looks great! We predict great things for this family.
Update: the text from above
Heating with wood has always been part of our family concept. My dad does it and we got into it when we were first married. We used to have a cute little house with a cute little stove where we could all watch the flames. Now we have a big chunky stove with no windows. I felt like we were missing out on half the benefit of having the fire.
What I did was cut some holes in the doors that I covered with woodstove glass that I ordered. It’s not perfect. My wife says it looks like an old-fashioned boiler. I am happy with it because I already see the kids gravitating that direction. I love looking at the fire.
The first picture is before I put everything together. The second picture shows the stove now.