December 30
It has been a very unique week with Christmas and everything else. First off, there was a fire on Christmas Eve during the day and it was in our area. It was just above the empty Santa Clarita River bed and just down the hill from where some houses were. The fire didn’t spread too much or get any houses and we weren’t asked to evacuate, so that was good.
Christmas Eve dinner was really good; I tried clam chowder and it wasn’t bad at all. The mother sent us and the elders, home with a huge stocking of candy and a gift. It was really sweet. Christmas Day we opened our gifts in the morning and then spent the day visiting with members and decorating the door of a less active member. Then we had an early dinner at our ward mission leader’s home with the elders in our ward and it was really great! We watched the video “Joy to the World” and then we went home for the night.
The day after Christmas we got a call from a member who moved into the ward, from American Fork, Utah, in August saying that they needed help moving out because they had to be out by that day. So we spent a few hours helping them move. The rest of the week was really slow.

January 6
Happy New Year! I hope you all welcomed the New Year with a bright new hope for this year. It was kind of a weird new year’s eve this year – we had to be in by 7pm and it was really quiet, like it was just a new day, nothing special; it was kind of odd.
This week wasn’t really busy; but, we had to drop one of our investigators. It was Savitri, the Indian from Figi because she really doesn’t understand that well and she can’t/won’t be baptized (she lives with her son and he won’t let her). Maybe later when there is someone who can teach her better in her own language she will be able to learn and perhaps get baptized. We got a really solid referral this week and we went by their house New Year’s Day and they were amazing! It’s Maria and Jamie and they have had missionaries before and are finally ready to learn again. We have a return appointment to teach them and we can’t wait. Maria has been reading the Book of Mormon and marking it so we are hoping all goes well with that. We also met Hector this week in our apartment complex and he just moved in. We met him as we were going to our apartment and he has many friends that are members and he just asked us on the street if we had a message for him. We set a time to go visit him again.
I child in the ward had just turned 8 and was being baptized and we were invited because the family had invited a lot of nonmembers so we got to meet some of them. Although we did not get anyone to teach, we got a chance to talk with them and perhaps some seeds were planted.

Love Sister Reese