It's time for our annual Senior Couples Christmas!! President and Sister Cannon host a wonderful dinner in the mission home. She always decorates so well...
Each one of the couples were assigned to bring something and Pres. & Sis. Cannon do the meat. I was assigned the dessert, so I made a Yule Long.
You make the cake, when it comes out of the oven, you roll it up in a towel that has powdered sugar on it to keep it from sticking, and let it cool. When cool, you unroll it, spread with cool whip & then re-roll it. Then frost it to look like a log. They were fun to do!
Here's the dining room group... Left to right around table: Elder Davis, Sister Davis (from Australia) , Sister Cheney, Elder Cheney (from Provo) , Elder Levitre, Sister Levitre (from Bountiful) , and Elder Mahaffey.. (sister mahaffey is, of course, taking the picture).
Here's the Kitchen group: President Cannon, Sister Giles, Elder Giles (from Midway, UT) , Sister Noble, Elder Noble (from AZ) , Sister Florence, Elder Florence (from Calgary, Alberta, Canada), and Sister Cannon.
After dinner we went downstairs to work on a service project. We were holding our senior couples dinner 2 days before the Missionary Christmas Parties. At that party they always hand out all the mail and packages that have come to the Mission office for the missionaries. Here we are just 2 days before the party and there are 25 missionaries who have not received ANY packages or mail from home! Can you imagine? Sister Cannon says they always have 3 or 4, and sometimes as high as 8 missionaries without anything, but NEVER this many! So, we mark some plastic sacks with the names of the missionaries & then we each take a sack & go around the tables to fill the sack. Wonderful people have given lots of things. One elder had an widowed aunt who sent about 50 little wrapped presents. Some send money to the mission home each year for them to buy things for this very purpose... so, we had wallets, socks, ties, CD's, blankets, slippers, and tons of candy. Some of us were madly wrapping, others were filling sacks so that these wonderful missionaries wouldn't end up with absolutely nothing on Christmas. Some of the missionaries live far away & often their parents don't send things... Tonga, Peru, Switzerland, Burundi, etc. and sometimes the parents just don't realize how long it takes the mail and the customs agents to deliver things and have just waited too long to mail, and sometimes the missionaries just come from homes that are either dysfunctional or poor or not very supportive and so don't send anything. It never dawned on us until tonight that we could help the missionary effort in any mission all over the world by just sending some money or gifts to your favorite mission home.
We did have a funny thing happen. President had told us that the Zarahemla Ward (Spanish) would be coming to carol to us at some time during the night. When these two came playing & singing, we just assumed it was them. Turns out they were caroling to raise money for ANOTHER church in town who is trying to build a new church! ha! So, of course, we gave money to them. This is the REAL group:
Then we went upstairs to the living room to relax and the President wanted each of us to tell about a memorable Christmas we've had.
President Cannon LOVES rootbeer floats, but he never buys them for himself. So, we gave him a 2-liter bottle of Mug Rootbeer with a sign on it that said, "The ice cream that goes with this is in the freezer!"
Then for Sister Cannon. In the kitchen of the mission home is this tacky, funny statue of Happy Cat. She got Happy Cat when she was in Thailand and it is a silvery-gold statue of a cat sitting up on it's back feet and holding it's other paws up by it's head & one of the paws moves up & down like it is saying hello. She says it's just a funny little thing, but when she saw it in Thailand it just made her laugh & so she bought one & brought it home. Now everytime she looks at it, it just makes her smile! So, when I was purchasing all the ornaments for our family for Christmas, there was an hinged ornament that looked EXACTLY like Happy Cat! So, I got it for her. She LOVED it! We also gave them a white glass ball ornament that has a picture of she & Pres. Cannon on one side & "Merry Christmas 2011" on the other side. It was such a fun night. Again, I will have to say, I totally did not realize how much you grow together as a family of senior couples out here in the mission field. These are such wonderful people and we truly do all love each other! It's going to be a GREAT Christmas!
First the missionaries all get together in the RS room to watch a movie. This is a highlight for them & they are always really excited to see what the movie is. The AP's played a joke on them by telling them that they wanted to have a more spiritual Christmas this year & so they would need to choose from the movies : The Restoration, The Mountain of the Lord, Mr Kruger's Christmas.. etc. (which we have all seen about a million times because we show them so often to our investigators) The missionaries were crushed! Then they told them they were just kidding... and they got to vote on: Tangled, Rio, 17 Miracles, & How the Grinch Stole Christmas. They all voted for Tangled. It was more fun to watch those missionaries be so enthralled with that movie than it was to watch the movie itself!
And setting the tables, and working really hard in the kitchen:
Then when the movie is done we feed them a wonderful dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes & gravy, stuffing, sweet potatoes, peas and corn, rolls, and a jello salad on the tables.... and, of course, dessert. We served about 70 each day.
Once the dinner is over They get a visit from a wonderful man who always tries to help out all the missionaries - Daniel. 
He is there to kick off the gift exchange. Everyone brings a white elephant gift and puts it on the table: 
Then, after dinner, each person goes up to take a gift & bring it back to their seats. Sister Cannon then reads a story about the "WRIGHT" family who "LEFT" their home. During the story, everytime she says right or left, you pass the gift. 
At the end, you open the gift you end up with and then each person has one chance to keep or exchange his gift. Elder Mahaffey REALLY liked his gift this year... 
Here he is with Elder Florence... who got a LEATHER JACKET !!! sheesh!
Then it was time for each Zone's performance. I laughed so hard at our zone. They sang the song "Last Christmas" by Ashley Tisdale. The lyrics of the chorus are: Last Christmas I gave you my heart, But the very next day you gave it away, This year, to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone special." Then one of the Elders would step forward and read a dear John letter & then tear it up... then another chorus, then a sister would read her Dear Jane letter... it was just so funny to hear them read these letters, then sing that chorus... 
After that we took our group picture... this represents 1/2 of our mission.. the half that our district and zone are in. 
At the end the Missionaries all gave us a Thank-you card for all we did for them. It was signed by everyone. This is one of our AP's - Elder Jacquier. 
Of course, I got my own reward: 
We also took a picture of our wonderful mission President - Pres. & Sister Cannon
On the way out, each missionary had the chance to vote for the new mission Pin - or in French it is epangelete. Whoever wanted could submit a design and then they are going to have the winner made up into pins we can wear. This was the winning design:
Then our sweet district pulled us aside and gave us some presents from them:
They gave Elder Mahaffey a beautiful blue tie, and me an ornament made from the picture we took of all our district in the beanies we gave them. Then an elder in our district actually KNITTED these slippers for us. Slippers are a big deal here. I guess because so often you must walk thru snow and slush, that everyone takes their shoes off & leaves them by the door - but in the winter floors are still very cold, so most people bring along their slippers, or people have a bunch of them in baskets by the door for guests to put on. But who knew Elder Mollinet would have the time or the ability to KNIT us these slippers. These guys never cease to amaze me!! It was a long, wonderful day. Fantastic to be in the presence of all these great men & women in the Canada Montreal Mission!
We had a hard time choosing, but ended up telling about the Christmas in Modesto, California in 1979 when we first had the Twelve Days of Christmas done to our family. That started a long string of years of remembering. Many couples had also had the Twelve Days of Christmas done to them. The one I liked best, however, was the Giles' story. (couple in picture # 2 that are sitting on the left side of the couch- beside the sister with the colorful slippers) They said their most memorable Christmas was this one. Their children told them that they were sending a large box. In it were 20 presents. This was to be the "20 Grandchildren Days of Christmas". There was one present from each grandchild and they were to begin on Dec. 4 and open one per day. They told of the wonderful experience this had been growing close to each individual grandchild! What a neat memory! After everyone left, we stayed behind a bit to give Pres. & Sister Cannon our gifts.
I know this photo will bring back YEARS of memories for our children when they sat at the kitchen table for HOURS and frosted sugar cookies! ahhhh... good times! (they, however, may remember those times a little differently!).. Anyway, we ended up making and decorating about 16 dozen sugar cookies! Our little tiny table couldn't even hold them all. We had to make about 4 dozen, frost them, then put them on TV trays and counters overnight for the frosting to harden while we started the next batch. We had cookies on placemats on the floor, on every counter and on every flat surface in our apartment!
We also dipped about a million pretzel sticks and later pretzel rounds with both white & milk chocolate, then rolled in crushed candy canes. Of course, not having too many kitchen dishes, we didn't have anything narrow and deep to melt the chocolate in... so we made a trip to the dollar store to purchase 2 tall, skinny mugs & we used those... one for the milk chocolate, one for the white chocolate. (Later they have made excellent hot chocolate mugs! ha!)
This particular plate was made for the senior couples- so it also has peanut brittle on it. What a disaster! I made about 4-5 batches of peanut brittle, trying to figure out what was wrong, why it wouldn't get crunchy... only stayed chewy. Finally, by replacing the butter from Walmart with a high grade butter, and throwing away my dollar store candy thermometer & just using "The Force" like I always used to, I finally got a good batch! Needless to say, all the other plates ended up only having cookies and pretzels! ha! Another year of wonderful memories! Thank heaven I have a wonderful companion who helps make the cookies and frosts them & even did the pretzels - or it never would have worked.
It has one little ornament on it... we took the picture we sent out with our Christmas card & had it put onto an ornament at Walmart... so we would have a remembrance of our first Christmas in the mission field together! Sister Merpaw also gave us a few other decorations... A cute snowman doorknob hanger and a Merry Christmas wall-hanging.
and a cute little santa for the end table...
We've hung our stockings with care...from the pass-thru window into the kitchen. We have two elders from Hawkesbury (an hour away) who come to work in Cornwall once a week and they spend the night at our apt. They come one week on Thursday night and the next week on Sat. night. Since they will be here for Christmas Eve & Christmas Day, we decided that they needed stockings too! (LOVE that dollar store!) 
Then we got a few gifts to decorate with... Misty sent us a present to open right away and a present to open on Christmas.. Can you believe it? A CRAFT project from Misty!!! I KNEW she had it in her! So we put up her NOEL letters on the top of our kitchen cupboards... you can see them the minute you walk in the door:
And now that it's getting cold... out come their portable garages. The missionaries call them quoi-shacks...but many people don't have garages here, or don't use them for their cars, so they erect these portable garages for the winter... guess it keeps them from having to scrape the windshields.
We have yet to see what happens to them during the snow-covered winter. They look really rather pretty, though, blowing in the wind everytime trucks or cars drive by.
And, you can see that the milk is fairly expensive here... usually in the $4.49 range for the 3 sacks. When we go to the states, we go to Walmart & buy it in gallon jugs for $3.01. All milk products like milk, cheese, cottage cheese, cream cheese, yogurts... they are all pretty expensive here. But the really interesting part of this milk-in-a-bag thing is what they do next. They have these small pitchers that you put the individual sacks into:
This is interesting because the pitcher is shorter than the bag. Now there is a real trick to pouring the milk without the milk bag collapsing and having milk go everywhere. You are supposed to snip one corner of the milk bag off.... then clip the other side with a smaller snip. This allows an air flow when you pour out of the larger snipped end & USUALLY the bag doesn't collapse in the pitcher. To me it would seem more practical to just make the pitcher taller & where the bag would fit perfectly, or just snip open the edge & pour it into the pitcher to serve... but I guess that would leave the milk open to absorb smells of other foods in your fridg... still... Lots of new things to get used to and know that they are.... uniquely Canadian!