Ready for Christmas

Hey mom! Sounds like you will have a full house for Christmas. That's awesome that Grandma and Grandpa are going to go visit Aunt Carol for Christmas. They are amazing people. I'm definitely going to miss all the traditions and being with you guys, but I'll try to have fun here too haha. On Christmas we're not sure what we're going to do. We have dinner with members but that's it. We don't really want to tract or anything because people don't want visitors on Christmas, so we are planning on going to do service at Salvation Army, and maybe a member will let us chill with them. I'll probably call in the afternoon sometime before our dinner. Thanks for everything!

I had a really good week this week. Last week was really frustrating, but this week things got better. At the beginning of the week the work was extremely slow, and we weren't able to get much done. We've been helping this one girl move out of her apartment, and this week we finally finished. It's not fun moving people when it's freezing outside. It's been getting a lot colder everyday too. The last few days it's been around -25 to -30 Celcius, and it's only going to get colder. I'm not sure what that is in Fahrenheit, but I think they even out and then Fahrenheit passes Celcius when it gets this cold. We are going to have to start plugging our truck in at night because it barely started this morning on our way to email. On Saturday Elder Smout was really sick so we had to stay in most of the day. I got a lot of reading done, and slept a lot too. That night the guys in the apartment above ours were jumping around and yelling until like 4 or 5 in the morning, so I didn't get like any sleep. Elder Smout took Tylenol PM so he was knocked out, but I had a terrible night. On Sunday church went well, and after church we went to a lesson with some potential investigators, and had a really good lesson about the Plan of Salvation. They had some really good questions, and want us to come back and teach them more. We are really excited about that. They seem really curious about what we believe, and they were interested about the Plan of Salvation. We also had our ward party last night, and that was pretty good. There was lots of food there, and we sang a lot of Christmas songs as a branch. Pretty much the whole branch was there. We are hoping to have a really successful next few weeks. Things are starting to look really promising here, so we are going to work hard to take advantage of all the opportunites we get to build the kingdom. Well, that was my week pretty much. I'm really excited to call home on Christmas Day. It definitely will be weird not being home, but we will have some fun here. Talk to you in a few days!! Love Mat