We loved our Christmas celebration this year. The Santa Lucia party was fun. It was great to have Dave and his family with us this year in addition to the Klundts and the Jon Brinleys. We enjoyed a wonderful evening at the Klundt's for Christmas Eve. Besides the usual impromptu nativity we viewed the DVD of an old one that we did in our Oak Cliff home with Nathan, Abbey taking all the rolls and Katy and Anne playing the part of the "holy and sacred" angels. It was so funny we had to play it twice. My favorite part of the Klundt's Christmas Eve program though, was hearing the whole family recite from memory "The Family: A Proclamation to the World". It brought tears of joy to my eyes as I thought how grateful we are that our grandchildren are all being raised to love the Lord and follow His teachings.

New Year's Eve this year was the best! Dave and Sandy's crew came in the night before and early Wednesday morning a councilor in our stake presidency came over and set Darin apart to be a missionary. He gave him a wonderful blessing. He thought about more things to bless him with than I could have imagined and then gave him a wild card at the end.
Shortly afterwards we found ourselves at the MTC mingling with all those other greenies, mounds of luggage and hundreds of bipolar parents. (I say "bipolar" because we pretty much all ricocheted from bouts of extreme sadness to extreme joy as we said goodbye to our missionary.) Darin was ready and eager to go so it was mostly tears of joy in this case. What a great day!

Dave and family left for Eden soon afterwards to pack up and hit the road early New Year's Day for Canada. I hope they missed the storm predicted here for Friday afternoon. We haven't heard yet.

That night we celebrated and "almost" brought in the New Year with Jon's family. That was fun! We made pizza, played games, put together a puzzle, watched "Night at the Museum" and just had a good time. About 11:00, however, Doug and I decided to pretend we lived in the time zone just east of us and call it good. At the stroke of midnight we were crawling into bed as we watched the replay of the ball drop in New York Time's Square. Sure glad I wasn't there.

Thanks Jon and Denise for a wonderful evening. Thanks Dave and Sandy for a wonderful day, thanks Klundts for a wonderful Christmas Eve, and thanks to all of you for your pictures, cards, Personal History letters (We loved reading those! Great stuff!). And thanks to all of you for making this a challenging but wonderful 2008.

Doug and I have attended a few funerals of friends of ours this year as we did last December and January and with each one we are just so grateful we enjoyed another year together and look forward to many more.

As most of you know by now we are beginning 2009 with a bang. Tomorrow Doug is baptizing a man he met in an elevator in Phoenix a couple of months ago. It looks like he's started our mission without me. We'll report on how that went later.

Love Mom and Dad