Letter dated 16Dec2013

Dear Family and Friends: The church had its Christmas Party on Saturday. We had a Swedish "Jul Bord," or Christmas Table. The Christmas Tables are full of awesome traditional Swedish Christmas foods, like ham, meatballs, rice pudding (by the cauldron), Jul Must (a type of soda) and gingerbread cookies. We also had some Apple Pie (from us missionaries) and lots of great Arabic food (from a really awesome family from Iraq!). We sang lots of songs and had a great time! A great highlight of this week was that our investigator, Marie, said that she wants to be baptized! She really loves coming to church and has a wonderful desire to follow the Savior. She is from Nigeria and speaks French, English, and Pigeon English (very different from normal English). She is neighbors with the Iraqi family whom I mentioned earlier. It is quite funny: the family only speaks Swedish and Arabic, so they can only communicate with Marie very simply. But they are best of friends! She goes over there every day and just spends time with them. It is sorta funny but super cool that they are such good friends with each other! One pretty funny thing that happened was Elder Cahill and I filled our bike tires up with air one night. Even though we are both science majors, we forgot that air expands when it's warmed. So after bringing our bikes into the apartment for the night, the tire warmed up and exploded! It was super crazy! So we've been off our bikes for a bit. This week we're having a multi-zone Christmas zone conference which we're super excited for. It will be a really great week, and then it's Christmas!! All super, duper exciting!!! I won't get a chance to e-mail until the day after Christmas, but I hope each of you has a very merry Christmas :) I can't wait to talk to the family on Christmas day!! I know that Christ was born in order to redeem the world, and I am so thankful for the scriptures which testify and teach of Christ. Here's a picture of Sweden's first snow, about a week and a half ago. Pretty exciting :D Love, -- Äldste Daniel Schindler