Merry Christmas!!

Hey everyone!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!! This is SUCH an exciting time of year; I love it! I hope everything back home is going well and you all are having an incredible time. Things here have been pretty average for the most part. We had zone conference which is always fun, and this time it was even better because we had all the zones on the island there, so 5 zones in all. We had a great training by our zone leaders about applying the Plan of Salvation to our mission « lives » and it was really impressive. I really like having Elder Pratt as our new zone leader; he is really impressive. Then after all of the trainings we had a little Christmas party for the missionaries. Several of the sisters in the Montreal ward had cooked us a beautiful Christmas dinner and we all got to wear Christmas hats and got Christmas presents. It was so much fun : ) I loved seeing all of the elders from last transfer who had been transferred to other places.

I don`t have much news other than that…I really can`t think of anything that`s happened this week. On Monday we went Christmas caroling for FHE, and that was a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time finding since most of our potentials/investigators are MIA due to finals or going home for Christmas or a lack of interest. We did go visit April, the recent convert who was baptized right before I got here, and that was really sad. She`s not interested in the slightestin hearing anything to do with religion and kept us very much at arms length. It was one of those times where the other person is being as rude as they can while still putting on the pretense of being polite. It really was upsetting. Poor Sister Williams took it really hard and ended up crying half the night because of it. Hopefully someday she`ll realize what she`s missing out on… This week should be pretty exciting, although a bit unproductive. My companions have both been sick for the past few days. Sister Williams was so bad she couldn`t even stand up, so we haven`t been as productive as we would`ve liked to have been. They`re now both getting better and I`m starting to get it. Not fun. But we`re hoping to all be better by Christmas : ) OH, and it`s so exciting, after weeks of begging we actually have Christmas plans now! We all hinted strongly in our President`s letters last week that we needed a Christmas dinner since we were the only missionaries we knew that didn`t have one, and then in his training, President talked about his first Christmas in France in which he didn`t have a heater in his room (there was only a space heater to heat the whole apartment and the senior comp had it in his room) and none of his presents had gotten there on time and his comp wouldn`t let him watch while he opened his, so Christmas morning he got up and ironed his sheets to remove the ice from them so they were warm enough to crawl back into and try to sleep while his comp opened his presents. So we figured we wouldn`t get any sympathy from him. BUT! Luckily Sister McKinnon was feeling generous and has invited several companionships over for Christmas Eve dinner, which should be SO fun : ) Then the Bishop of the family ward invited the whole zone over for a brunch on Christmas Day, then a woman who we just met 2 days ago invited us over for Christmas dinner since it was only going to be her and her 40 year old son, so we`re pretty excited about all of that : ) I`m not entirely sure when I`ll be calling home, but probably sometime between 1 and 5 Christmas afternoon…I don`t quite know how it will work out either. I was supposed to buy a calling card today, but I forgot to, so if we get them I`ll be calling from either the church or our cell phone. If not, then I`ll be going to the Anderson`s (the senior couple here…I just love them!) and using Skype to call home.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas! Thanks again so much for the support and letters and everything : ) I love you all tons!
Love, Sister Nicole Lindsey