Gratitude

The Saturday after Thanksgiving the senior couples gathered together at the Area Office and had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner.  We had 50 people for dinner and everyone had a good time.  They do have turkeys in New Zealand, but they are hard to come by and they are not cheap.  A 12 - 13 pound turkey can cost $65.00 to $70.00 dollars.  Some of the other things that are harder to find in New Zealand are ready-made pie crusts and canned pumpkin.  Can you tell that Susan likes to go the easy route, and not make it all from scratch.

We had four different ladies cook the turkeys, make the stuffing and the gravy.  All the others had food assignments to feed 15+ people.  Cooking a turkey is also a challenge, as most of our apartments have small ovens.  A few apartments have larger ovens, so they cooked the turkeys.

Several sisters volunteered to decorate a table.  This required them bringing dishes and tableware for 8 from their apartment.  There are some very creative people in our group.  Check the sea shell decorations out at one of the tables.  We gathered together on Saturday afternoon, so no ties allowed except the mission president who had a baptism to go to afterward.  We let him off the hook this time.

We truly have much to be thankful for.  We enjoy good health, have a comfortable apartment, and a beautiful country to live in.  We have two new grandsons and all our family are doing well.  With all these blessings, we are reminded often to be positive about the challenges we face in life.  There really is much to be thankful for.

Christmas season in New Zealand falls in the summer.  We went with some other senior missionaries to a Christmas craft fair in a neighboring town.  All the decorations and the trees are out, but the weather does not look or feel like Christmas.  After our morning adventure we came back to our apartment and decided it was time to put up some decorations.  They may be quite sparse, but it is okay - we have an adventure planned for Christmas.

  So now it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas in our apartment anyway.  

"Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's will never be the same again once you have celebrated them while serving a mission...The twelve or eighteen months will seem as a small moment, but the memories will last through the eternities."  Vaughan J. Featherstone, April General Conference 1992