Happy Holidays

We know that friends and family back home are planning and preparing for Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays.  Once again, it has been difficult to feel the usual enthusiasm when all of the trees are fully leafed out and the bushes are in full bloom.  People have finally converted to shorts and jandals, and the university is out for the summer.  However, as we traveled to Invercargill a week ago for the first of the seminary graduations, we ran into this…

We both burst into song, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”.  We felt it.  We felt the spirit of Christmas, at least for the hour it took for us to drive through this mountainous stretch.  Now we’re back in Christchurch and this is how it looks out our front window.

Sister Neider wants to have a Thanksgiving dinner.  She started pricing turkeys and found out that a very small one costs $75.00.  Perhaps we’ll come up with a modification on the traditional menu.  She has also been trying to get me to buy a Christmas tree.  She found some good ones at the thrift store for very little money.  She doesn’t know me well enough to know that at home my daughter has to force me to put up a tree.  “Mother, you do have grandchildren you know.”  She’s unaware that I’ve been called the world’s biggest Scrooge because I take the decorations down by noon on Christmas day.  Christmas just isn’t the same without family, and a tree won’t help any, so I’m going to resist the non-existent urge.  Thanks anyway, Margo, I’ll just enjoy yours.  It has been a great thing to have Kenny and Margo down in Ashburton.  We get to see them often and they are wonderful friends.  I remember Mom and Dad really loved the couples they served with on their mission, and we thought we were going to miss out on that aspect of the senior missionary experience.  The Neiders will be our friends in the years to come and I’m sure we will become more familiar with the road between Bountiful and Idaho Falls.

As is always the case around here, we have been celebrating some holidays.  Last week we had two; Cup Day and Show Day.  Cup Day is a day at the races, horse races that is.  New Zealand is very much into horse racing.  Cities of any size at all have race tracks.  On Cup Day, women and men don their finest clothes and head to the races.  Women wear skimpy dresses and ‘fascinators’, headpieces of every variety with bows, ribbons, flowers, and feathers.  Here is a cheap example from the $2.00 store.

The racetrack does not seem to be the main attraction of the holiday, the booze is. 

Friday was Show Day in Canterbury.  This is the A&P Show; A&P for agriculture and pastoral.  Similar to our state fair, people go to see huge pigs and prize winning sheep, etc..  Here, though, everyone gets a day off from work.  It is a HOLIDAY for crying out loud.

I was sick last week and feeling quite miserable.  I needed to play for choirs and congregations during several sessions of stake conference this past weekend and was so grateful that after John and Kenny Neider gave me a blessing, I started to feel better quickly.  There really is no time for sickness right now.  We have to go north this weekend for the Nelson District seminary graduation on Saturday and then hurry back home for the seminary and institute graduation in Christchurch on Sunday night.  I have kids from my online class taking part in all of the seminary recognition programs.  I’m so pleased that 12 of them managed to earn a certificate of completion for this year.  Institute numbers are way up also.  I hope things will just keep moving in that direction.  

We’ll be thinking of you all bundled up and going over the river and through the woods to share Thanksgiving with each other.  We will shed sweaters and nylons in an effort to keep cool as we share chicken and give thanks from this part of the world.  From the bottom of our hearts we thank our Heavenly Father for his goodness and mercy to us.  We thank him for the wonderful people in our lives; people on both sides of this world.  We hope you feel his love as we do.