HAPPY BOXING DAY!

December 26, 2010 Sunday

Australia has the day after Christmas as Boxing Day. We aren’t sure where the tradition came from but it is considered a holiday. It’s kind of like most of our holidays at home where the stores are open, but other businesses are closed. We had church but instructions from Perth were that we only do a hour meeting.
Christmas was good. We had some packages to open in the morning and did our traditional fruit salad breakfast with “crumpets” this year. They are sort of like English Muffins but not quite. In the afternoon Raphy and Samantha came over and played games with us. Then Samantha and I tried to make our Thai egg rolls. I hadn’t found the right wraps at the store so I bought some rice paper wraps. And the sausage here wasn’t the same as what we are used to. Anyway after we deep fried the egg rolls, the wraps went translucent and cracked open in places. They were sort of okay, but not like the ones I learned to make in Thailand. Samantha said she was willing to take some home, so they weren’t a total “bust.”
We were able to talk to most of our siblings and kids and that was fun. We did most of the calls at 2 am here when it’s super cheap to call. They seem to be doing okay for the most part. This morning we made a couple more phone calls before church and a couple after church.
We had 6 at church this week—a 50% increase over last week. The parents of one of our inactive members came. Their daughter-in-law had a baby on the 13th, so they are here helping. They usually host a big family Christmas in Perth, so Christmas yesterday with a small family of 4 was very different for them. They did enjoy our little church because they said, “It was big in spirit.” Nice of them to say that since I spoke about keeping the spirit of Christmas all year long through service to others. I even tied Joseph Smith’s birthday into it by quoting the song he requested be sung shortly before he died, “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.”