December 27, 2015
Greetings from this balmy Pacific paradise. We’ve had a delightful week and a lovely Christmas celebration. It’s also been a very busy week up through Christmas Day. Life here continues to be great!
Christmas Eve’s original plan was to close the Visitors’ Center at 6pm, gather all of the missionaries in the Zone (elders and sisters) for a dinner and a program. However, when it turned out that the Polynesian Cultural Center was completely sold out every day of the week, Elder Priday, the Center Director, decided to change things up a little bit. He moved the dinner from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day afternoon and changed the closing time to 7:10pm.
This change was made to accommodate the tram tour from the PCC to the Visitors’ Center. The trams between 6pm and 7pm are the busiest and bring the most visitors to the Center. Rather than turn them away, the Center stayed open until the last tram left for the evening. Our normal schedule was for us to be on duty from 9am to 2:30pm on Christmas Eve, but we planned to switch with Elder and Sister Priday (that they would take the morning shift and we would take the afternoon shift) so they could prepare the dinner. When the dinner moved to Christmas Day, we went back to our normal schedule. I’m sure this isn’t all that interesting, but it does show how dynamic things are here and the flexibility needed!
The sister missionaries planned the program for Christmas Eve and did a wonderful job. They put together a script that moved us through various areas of the Visitors’ Center that depicted parts of Jesus’ birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection. The performance was quite moving and definitely added to the spirit of the evening.
Sister Smith and I spent much of our morning and afternoon on Christmas Day at the Center assisting sister missionaries make Skype or FaceTime calls home to their families. They were allotted about 45 minutes to make the call. Using our iPads as well as the two iPads that belong to the Center, four missionaries could call at the same time. Using Skype or FaceTime they could move around the Center and show their families the facility and explain what they did every day at the Visitors’ Center. It was a lot of fun helping them get in touch with their families… working through all the technical issues of userids, passwords, Intermet issues, unfamiliarity with Skype and FaceTime at the other end of the conversations, etc. kept the day quite interesting. Just call Elder Smith the Skype / FaceTime “help desk”.
The absolute highlight of Christmas Day, however, was a video conference call with our family. Jaelene set up this capability and we were all able to be on the same video conference talking to each other at the same time … all through a web browser. I love what technology can do for us today! Even better, there were very few technical issues (Jared and Tania were able to connect from their car parked by the side of the road somewhere around Tacoma)!! We definitely need to do this more often. Thanks, Jaelene and family for making our day!
After dinner all of the Visitors’ Center missionaries gathered back at the Center for a white elephant gift exchange followed by a movie. We watched “The Forgotten Carols”, a very nice Christmas movie. Then it was finally back to the house and (finally) to bed.
Saturday we had our normal morning shift at the Center, which was an unusually busy day. The Laie Temple was closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, open from 6am to 1pm on Saturday, and then is closed until January 19th. Christmas is a very popular time for weddings, meaning that quite a few weddings were scheduled for Saturday morning at the Temple. That means lots of family and kids, who can’t be in the Temple, come to the Center to pass the time. We enjoy having a full, busy Center and the sister missionaries were kept very busy all day on Saturday. After our shift ended at 2:30, we came home and decided that since the rest of the day was open, we would finally take the time to see the new Star Wars movie, “The Force Awakens”.
Laie has a small family-owned movie theater with two screens xczcvbnmxcvbnbnm,(http://www.laiepalmscinemas.com/). The theater shows family-friendly movies and, fortunately for us, the Star Wars movie is considered “family friendly”. We went to the 6:30pm movie and we both thoroughly enjoyed the movie. We will definitely see it another time! The theater is quite small and the so-called “big screen” isn’t necessarily all that big, but we were there with a close to sold-out crowd (about a hundred people), with popcorn and real butter…. Heavenly. It’s been more than a year since either of us have been to a movie.
The coming week will continue to be pretty busy at the Center. The PCC will be full which means a lot of visitors to the Center. We’ll be at the Center on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, have our preparation day on Wednesday, and then mornings at the Center on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The Center will close early on New Years Eve and will open at noon on New Years Day. More on all of that next week, though.
As we drove over to the movie theater last night, Sister Smith and I remarked about how busy we seem to be and how much different it is than what we thought it would be nine months ago when we embarked on this adventure. Fourteen months left and it’ll be over in a heart beat, it seems. We love you all and pray for the very best for you in the coming new year! 2016 should be a wonderful year!
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