A European Christmas

Our Church Week—We made several special visits this week to invite outer-lying families to invite them to our Branch meal,which is our big event for the month. The meal we actually had today; but will show you those pictures next week since they will take some time to upload. And we are wilting as the night goes on.....

We have a Spanish-speaking family that lives close to the Spanish border and whose records just arrived at our Branch. They also speak French to varying degrees. There are 3 children, 14, 14 and 15 who are members of the Church and whose parents are not. But the parents are very supportive of their children being members. However, they live an hour away, the Mom works on Sundays and the older son leaves for boarding school on Sunday nights since they are so outer-lying. We had a very nice phone conversation and we will visit them in about 10 days to meet them in person. The youth will be off of school by then and their Mom will bring them to Church the two weeks the youth are off. That is devotion given the distance the parents will travel for their children and the parents not being members themselves.

We consider it a great blessing that even though all our youth live far away, they all live far away in the same general direction, about 20 minutes from each other. That is a huge blessing for us given our geographic distances!! So we are in hopes of planning an activity we will take to them. That way the youth can get together for a fun activity. We will take our long-distance Seminary teacher with us so she can meet them and they can be enrolled in Seminary. Seminary is a Church program that runs 4 years at the HS level ages 14-18. Every year the course covers a different set of scriptures, such as the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, etc. Where the Church is well populated, the HS aged youth go to Seminary before they go to school in the mornings, so usually 6am-7am…and for 4 years. Both our girls attended this type of “early-morning” Seminary. For us, hats off to any youth that voluntarily gets up EARLY M-F all during the school year. Some Seminary programs meet during the school day (called release-time) and they have Seminary as one of their HS classes in a Church building adjacent to the HS. In areas spread out like ours, the students do their Seminary studies on their own and meet once a week together on a Skype call with others from our Stake Level (several Branches and Wards combined). The long-distance Seminary teacher happens to be in our Branch. So we will take her with us to meet her 3 new students.

This week we also met with another Spanish-speaking woman (Maria) who hails from Paraguay. She lived in Tahiti for a number of years as well and now lives in Tarbes. So she knows French; but prefers to speak in Spanish, her native tongue. We went with the missionaries to all meet her and helped her find where the Church is located. She does not drive so that makes it harder. She joined us today in Church and she was just beaming. Her husband, who is not a member, brought her and picked her up today. Marc helped her with her genealogy and family tree, taking pictures of her family pictures on her wall and then uploading them to www.familysearch.org, our church's genealogy and family history site.

We also visited with the Missionaries with Louise who is learning about the Church and lives around the corner from Maria. We invited her to our special program and “repas” (dinner) afterwards. She loves to cook and made a special, traditional yuletide log cake.

The Louit family also had us over for a special Christmas dinner. They have adopted us, the missionaries and Frère Pho, from Cambodia. Once a month, Christine has been having Frère Pho over for the past several years. They have helped him learn French over the years and have taken him in as family. Christine is a gourmet cook and Frère Pho a gourmet sushi Chef. France is known for its multi-course meals and Christine and Christian are gracious hostesses. France is just NOT the place to try to diet. Christine really outdid herself on this meal. They decorate for their grandchildren who are nearby so the house was festive in every corner. They have a Christmas village collection and it’s typically European. We felt absolutely transported with all their decorations.

Then out came the courses of food. They have had us over a few times before. This is dining (usually 2 hours) and a 5-star restaurant!! And this time it seemed 6-stars (out of the top level begin 5-stars). This meal lasted 3 hours. She served two “Mormon” Champagnes without alcohol. Both were regional drinks and filling by themselves. Then out came pumpkin soup with croutons in an earthenware crock…..followed by fois gras (goose liver pate) on toast, salmon-wrapped aperitifs and another regional salad. We were quite filled twice over…..but the main course had not arrived yet. The larger-than-normal entrée dish had two types of regionally prepared meats, one made with turkey and the other with pork, a vegetable dish and au gratin potatoes. By then, even the missionaries (who walk all day and so can eat beaucoup) were starting to feel they had reached their limit. But make room because the next course of fruit cocktail was placed before us…..which we thought was dessert. But out came dessert course number one (Chocolate mousse with whipped cream and chocolate sticks), followed by dessert course two (chocolate ice cream yule log cake)….then number three (Crème Brule yule (Bûche de Noël) cake). And of course it’s Christmas in France, so no meal is complete without a clementine from Spain to mark the end of dinner. It seems we need another word to describe a “dinner” in France of this preparation, length and amount of food. Food fit for kings and queens.

The rest of the week we transported decorations to the Church and made our share of the "repas".

Our town is Annecy—continuation and at Christmas time.

A la prochaine