Christmas

It was a unique Christmas down under. Not bad, just unique.

Perhaps the highlight of the holiday was the night before Christmas. We had about 30 people over for dinner. People investigating the church, missionaries, a friend of Garrett and his family, and our family.

After dinner Garrett and I were in charge of running a game. We played Celebrity. Basically, for those of you not in the know, this is glorified charades. All participants put 3 names in a bowl (in our case, names from the scriptures) and then you divide in to two teams and alternate. Three rounds to get as many as you can. First round you can act it out or use descriptive words. Second round you can only say one word and act it out. Last round you can't use any words.

Many of our participants were either English as a Second language people, or more "senior" or just plain slow. It made for an interesting time.

Here are some of my favorite moments.

1. One of the senior lady missionaries put the name "Dorcas" in the bowl. This has two parts of funny. The first was when a missionary drew it and tried to get people to know who it was by saying "it's a name you call someone in America when they're not smart or annoying." We got a lot of colorful language, but no one hit on Dork, which would clearly lead to Dorcas. Second bit--the missionaries insisted there was no person named Dorcas in the bible and the Sr. Sister who put it spent the whole rest of the game disengaged, searching her scriptures for Dorcas, only at the very end joyfully jumping to her feet to read a passage of scripture proving the woman's existence. Her team lost, but she claimed a personal victory.
(See her studying as the game goes on)


2. One of the investigators was an Asian girl who spoke very little English and wasn't very familiar with some of the scriptures and their names. Especially ones from the random Book of Mormon. She got extremely frustrated as she tried to get her team to just get one name and finally started shouting (clearly against the rules) "it starts with J and has 5 letters." The best part is that her team still didn't get it causing Garrett to tell the whole team how pathetic they were as he snorted in disdain.



3. The last one I'll share was another investigator named Randall. He was about late 40's and Australian/Caucasian (meaning English WAS his first language) and he looked a bit like Ichabod Crane. He said some rather odd things at dinner, but the topper was when in the middle of the game he decided he wanted to contribute. (He didn't know many of the scriptural names that were getting called either.) Right as mom sat down and took the bowl he snuck over and threw a piece of paper in the bowl. Since it was on top, mom grabbed it first and got a strange look on her face. She had no idea what to do with it until one of the more "aware" missionaries figured out what paper she was looking at and snatched it out of her hands telling her to move on. Garrett and I looked at the paper Randall had written to see what name he put. He wrote, "Strong, Large, Small." Could the set up be more perfect that he wrote that and put it in just in time for mom to draw it?? Later we learned he was doing a new version of the game where he gives the clues rather than the name. Or something.

All in all, it was a delightful evening with very little sense to it, but a jolly spirit and a lot of love, and after all, isn't that what Christmas is really all about?


Also including a few pics from Christmas Day.

Dad dressed up as Santa to deliver presents to all the missionaries. The first pic is him showing us how he's "grown into" his Santa suit over the last 3 years.



Dad also had two little helpers. Garrett would NOT agree to antlers, but finally was persuaded to wear a Jr. Santa hat. He said he WOULD have worn a full elf costume if it was an option, which leads me to wonder why that is better than antlers...?



Christmas Morning.



I gave dad and Garrett matching "No worries" T-shirt which only dad was willing to model.