December 26, 2011

And, we wonder why kids are afraid of Santa?

Belfast City Hall and International Market in foreground

Belfast City Hall

Belfast Harbour

We hope all of you had a very special Christmas and are looking forward to wonderful, healthy, happy, and richly blessed 2012!
Had some pretty sick grandchildren this week. :( Sage with a fever of 103 degrees and throwing up, (she's such a tiny little thing, we hate to see her so sick! She needs to keep her food down.) Gavin with a trip to emergency with a molar that died, was infected and needed to be extracted. Glad they were both all better for the holidays!
Found out about moves (transfers) today. We're grateful for the missionaries that will be staying on with us in this area and sad to see some move on. It amazes me how attached you get to these young elders and sisters in a very short time!
We went to Dublin Tuesday for an "All Ireland Zone Conference." We had a most enjoyable time together. There were around 66 of us there including President and Sister Griffiths - our mission president and his wife. We watched "17 Miracles" (which we hadn't had the opportunity of seeing before we got out here.) So touching and inspiring! Elder Blickenstaff was called out to help with the inspecting of cars and I was called out the last 20 minutes or so to help with wrapping presents for the missionaries who hadn't yet received presents from home. So we still haven't seen the whole movie. We had a very tasty lunch provided by the local Relief Society sisters and a very fun gift exchange. We heard many inspiring conversion stories from some of our missionaries who will shortly be going home. We had a reading of The Fourth Magi, which is a Griffiths family tradition, with the singing of Christmas hymns intermingled. It was a very enjoyable day. Sure wish we could do some of our traveling to and from places in the daylight over here. Traveling anywhere over here is beautiful, but it has to be daylight to get the benefit from it!
We had a very successful Institute Christmas dinner Wednesday. 49 YSA's, eight missionaries (including us), the stake presidency and their wives and the institute teachers were in attendance. We had Chinese take out. (That was a first for us. :D ) We had a great gift exchange where Elder Blick read a Left/Wright Story. What's that you ask? Well. . . go google it. It was a fun/funny way to get the gifts all mixed up. They had "great craic" with that. The rest of the night was Karaoke singing and just mixing and mingling. I LOVE THIS MISSION! We've been called to party, party, party!!!
We spent a couple of days with one of our elders keeping him company in the hospital. Nothing serious, he just needed to have a procedure done. He was only supposed to be in overnight, but the doctor never came back the next day to release him so he had to stay another night. I became best friends with his mother. ; ) I was their source of communication with each other and keeping her up with how things were going with him. I know how I would feel if I was so far away from any of my children and something of an emergency nature happened . . . Oh wait! That already happened with our son, Jason, when he broke both bones in his left leg not long ago . . .
We had a great Christmas Eve dinner with six missionaries here at our flat. Four that are in our district and two others that invited themselves along. ; ) We enjoyed visiting, eating a nice big meal and having Elder Blickenstaff read us the Christmas story from Luke Chapter 2, with the Joseph Smith translation added in to clarify. It's a tradition that we've done with our children for the last 34 years, so we are continuing it over here. Then we were off to a musical Christmas Eve program over at the Cavehill Ward building. Very wonderful program with much musical talent.
Christmas day was spent at a sacrament meeting at the Bangor building with the combined Bangor First and Second Wards. Great talks by both bishops there. One on Joseph, the earthly father of the Savior. Not much of anything is recorded about him, but we can only imagine what an amazing man he must have been to be trusted to be the guardian of the Son of God.
We spent the remainder of our Christmas day at a nice family Christmas dinner with the Nobles (institute teachers) and some of their children and grandchildren, a great gathering of around sixteen people. We finished off the festivities by facetiming (video-chatting) with 4 of our 5 kids.
There you have it! Our Christmas out in the mission field, "Norn Iron" style.

HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all!
With much love, Sister Blickendinker

eejet - idiot
peelers - police
stick - cane
shattered - very tired
nye - now