Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

This week was a hoot and a holler. I got to go on exchanges for three days. Our investigator gave me an awesome present. We had Christmas. Got to FaceTime the family.

I got to go on exchanges with Elder Janes for three days while Elder Hoyer and Elder Taylor went to Valdez to check up on those missionaries. It was really crazy looking after two areas. Elder Janes and I stayed busy 24/7.

There's this awesome neighborhood all lit up with lights. The best part is that it's tuned into a radio station so the lights are set up to match certain notes on different songs. Everyone goes to it pretty much every week so we decided to stop by. I took a video. I'll attach it below.

We taught Dawn again. This time her family was there as well. They actually came to church on Christmas which is a huge step for them. Dawn has been hoping and working with them trying to get her kids involved which will then lead to her husband getting baptized. She's amazing. She hopes her husband gets baptized soon that way he can baptize his daughter. The family still has a ways to go so it won't be anytime soon but it's still incredible seeing the progress they are making. Dawn actually got me a gift since I've been here so long and have taught her everything. She gave me a silver token with my name and the Ten Commandments engraven on it. It's amazing. The reason why she put the Ten Commandments on there is bc when we taught her the Ten Commandments the spirit was so strong. The lesson went on for over two hours, and at the end we all just started crying. It was weird but awesome. By far one of the best experiences on my mission.

We went to our first counselor in the mission presidency's house for Christmas Eve. We went as a zone since he lives really close. It's was pretty fun. He's been holding on to our presents for the past two weeks so the best part was actually getting the presents we should have had earlier.

 Facetiming the family was fun.

 Happy New Years

                              

Christmas gift from investigator Dawn

                                 

                               Facetiming with Bennett!                             

 

Every year our family gets matching PJ's

for all the cousins. So I sent matching 

jammies for Bennett and Elder Hoyer!

All he needs for Christmas is a Flowbee!

Not a whole lot has happened this weeek. The only exciting thing is that we had Zone Conference. Elder Hoyer and I have been struggling to find effective work recently. We have plenty of stuff to do but nothing really effective. That's been a bummer.

I tried cutting my hair again. It didn't work out too well. I started out by doing the sides and back with a number four (attachment on the hair cutter) and thought it looked good. I started to feel a bit more confident and decided I could do the top. I grabbed the biggest size I could see and just went straight down the middle up top. I looked in the mirror and said "oh fetch!" I guess the biggest size was a five and I had no clue as to how to clean it up and make it even so my hair has been looking a bit spotty these past few days.

We had the Valdez Elders come stay with us for Zone Conference. They spent two nights. It was super fun having them stay. It was Elder Stoddard and his companion. Elder Stoddard and I came out together and became pretty good friends. We pretty much stayed up all night talking. Zone Conference was pretty fun as well. I was dead tired after sitting in the same room all day.

Happy Holidays

Here's a photo of the Palmer Zone. Idk why my forehead is so shiny but whatever it is here it is.

Baby isn't cold outside...and inside!

Hey. This week has been solid. The heat in our apartment went out again. It's so cold my eyelashes keep freezing together. The Palmer Stake put on this nativity show for all of Palmer and Wasilla. Church was only 45 mins long. The way it's supposed to be.

This week our apartment's heat has been off. It was absolutely freezing. It was the worse feeling. We would come home after a long day in the cold and have no source of heat. We literally ran a little space heater in the bedroom 24/7. We did all our planning, exercises, studying, eating, etc in the bedroom. The only time we would leave the room was to shower and get ready for the day. Even then we didn't spend a whole lot of time in the actual apartment. It got to the point where I cold see my breathe in the apartment. To our joy our landlord responded and helped get the heat running again. We are now back into the swing of things as usual.

Its been getting really cold up here. As I always write about. But for some reason our mission president has really been pushing getting outside and talking to people on the streets. It's really funny because there's literally no one outside so it makes it really difficult to accomplish anything. It really only works for the missionaries down in Anchorage. Just the other day we were walking in the streets looking for people and my eyelashes would get stuck together. It got so cold they were freezing together as I blinked. It's crazy. The worse part is everyone says this is warm for this time of year. 

The Palmer stake has an annual nativity show. They get everyone from the community to bring nativities from all over the world, big and small, traditional and crazy. It was awesome. They also have live nativities with kids. It was unbeleiveable to see every room in the church building filled with hundreds of nativities. It was absolutely amazing. Everyone from Palmer and Wasilla as well as people from Anchorage come up to see it. It goes on Saturday and Sunday so our church services were shorter. We only had sacrament meeting for 45 minutes. That was neat.

Anyways hopefully it gets warmer or snows more. One of the two.

Elder Ogden

We have to dress all the up for the outside

Bennett's doing all the talking:

This week has been pretty neat. Elder Hoyer is officially my new companion. We attended a surprise party for this random old man. We had the Ward Christmas party. It's finally cold outside.

Elder Hoyer is really different from Elder Agad and Elder Bacon. That's for sure. Elder Hoyer isn't very social. He likes to stay quiet. It forces me to do all the talking, which is interesting. It's definitely going to be an interesting transfer serving with him. He's been telling me a lot of stories how he reports people to president. There's a good number of Elders in this mission who don't really like him for that reason so I'm kinda seeing this transfer as a test from president. Jk. But for real it probably is. 

On Saturday we got this text from Linda inviting us to her 89 year-old fathers surprise birthday party. Linda is a lady we accidentally visited. For some reason when we showed up at her door we were planning on meeting Alvin, a potential investigator who apparently doesn't live there. Linda is super Jewish. she goes to Jerusalem at least once a year and plans on moving there. The one time we met her she talked for hours. Anyways she invited us to this surprise party so we decided to go. When we showed up there was only five other people, a pastor and his wife, Linda, and three random old ladies. It was odd. The only gift we found that we could give was a physical copy of 17 Miracles. Hopefully the old man watches it. The pastor gave us a weird look when he saw what it was. Lol.

We had the ward Christmas party on Saturday. That was super fun seeing everyone at the church. It was amazing seeing our investigators being involved with the church. It's getting cold here. That's for sure. It dumped just the other day leaving a bunch of snow. I had to pull out the sorrels.

Happy holidays
Elder Ogden