Holidays!

Well it's been a big couple of weeks! My apologies for not updating you last week but we had a lot going on in our family (funeral, birthday, surgery...etc) Elder Gale got transferred last week to a town called San Angel. It's on the side of the Monterrey mountain and very steep so he's getting a lot of good exercise. His new companion is Elder Contreras. He says they get along so well because they're both kind of goofy and like to joke. Last week Mitch wrote: "Poor corrupt Mexico! We were walking along the road and someone who was loading their car with stuff dropped something. With the intention of being helpful, I leaned down to pick it up for them. They, quite startled I might add shot me a nasty look. My companions just started laughing at me. They told me that I couldn't do stuff like that because I'd look like a thief. I felt kind of bad. What can you do?" Mitchell also told us that his companions (there are two companionships in the same area so they spend a lot of time together) have been practicing their English and wanted to try talking to some real Americans. So on Christmas Kylee and I got to meet the other three boys (who are all native) and had a really fun discussion with them. Since we were skyping, we could see all the silly things they were doing in the background and listen to them as they appeared on camera and talked to us in English. When Mitchell asked if it had snowed there, we offered to show him the beautiful Christmas snow we'd had that day. He gathered the other boys around (who have never seen snow) and we took the laptop outside to show them the 5 or so inches of new snow we had. As we got to the front porch we heard a collective "Ohhh!" from the Mexicans. LOL They asked Mitchell to ask me to make a snowball which I did on camera for them. Then they asked me to throw it. I think the idea of frozen water is more interesting to them than we think it is. We had such a wonderful time talking to our boy and seeing how happy he was. He now has the same skin color as his companion and he's lost some weight so his clothes are bagging on him a bit. He said everything was holding up well and that the weather was just starting to get about like our fall temperatures here in Utah so he gave his heavy blanket away. He also gave one of his suitcases to an Elder who had nothing to hold his things in (he comes from a very poor family in Mexico) which was very nice. Although now I wonder if he is going to need it somewhere down the road. Some of you may know that Mitchell is a pretty accomplished guitarist. He plays acoustic and electric and before his mission he was in two different bands. I wondered what he was going to do with himself without his beloved guitars for two years. But Mitchell told us that he bought...a mandolin! LOL He's teaching himself to play it and has even written a couple of songs. Funny. I'll upload some Christmas pictures as soon as I can!