Christmas Week

Dear Family,

I can't believe Christmas is only 3 days away and there is still no snow here, what the heck?! It's been raining a lot but not cold enough for snow, so looks like we won't be getting any for Christmas...oh well.  We have been enjoying our life in our new apartment, it's still really nice because we won't be buying any food for a while, still haven't made a dent in all the food the sisters left here. We've been getting a lot of food from members that went home for Christmas, so we were given 3 gallons of milk and like everything that was sitting out on a counter, like bread, chips etc. So even if we did make a dent in the food, all of this food given to us has filled it back up.

We had our Christmas Zone Conference and it went well. We all had to get a white elephant that was under $5 so I found some Spam playing cards, they had a recipe on the back of each card of something you could make with Spam and had pictures of Spam on every card, so kind of funny. The white elephant I received were some Andes mints and some pens....not really a white elephant gift but I sure did enjoy the mints! :)

We met a really interesting guy last week, he's an older guy and he has hundreds of G.I. Joes!! He's also in a Renaissance group so he make his own chain mail and has like 20 different daggers, swords, axes and mallets etc. Kinda scary and creepy, he lives in a basement that is made for short people, so I have to duck my head the whole time. He's into horror movies and scary masks but he is a cool guy. We have seen him twice, we did get him to start reading the Book of Mormon again so that's good!

We went to the temple on Friday, so makes for a great week! The temple is always the best place to go and we had a great time. After wards, a member payed for us to go somewhere to eat so we went to Time-Out Chicken and we were the only white people there. Then some other Elders showed up so we had 12 white men in suits ordering chicken, they sure have some good chicken!

We had our Christmas program at church and the choir did a pretty good job. We had a much better turn out then all of our practices so that made it a lot better!

For Christmas, I have no idea when I will Skype, we were invited to a home on Christmas Eve and hopefully by then I'll know our plans. I was also invited to a home for Christmas, so I'll Skype from there. It will probably be the craziest, funniest Christmas I've ever had....they have kids in town and are just out of control and so funny! I'm really looking for to that.

Merry Christmas Everyone!!!!

Remember the reason for the season!!

Love, Elder Searle