Hey there and Merry Christmas Family!

Good day to you all I hope you all had a good week and I got some fun reports...it's always a treat to hear from all of you. We've had a way good week hear, and it will only get better tomorrow! Woo! We're all geared up for the big skype home. So I'm planning on 8:00 p.m. our time which is 9:00 your time is what I've heard....I guess we have a 11 hour time difference. You might want to check my sources on my time zones. but it'll be a party!

But for the most part it sounds like things are going along well there at the ranch and that you all got your big Christmas parties going on and everything. Your havin’ all the neighbors over for a party? Wow look at you go there! And thanks for the fun Siberian cabin there...it looks like you had some successful gingerbread house making. Good work I'm glad your all havin’ a good time.

Well as far as these parts go, it's definitely been a different week of missionary work than I'm used to. We had to spend a good amount of the week down here in the office preparing for zone conferences and getting schedules put together for visa trips and all that good stuff. It's pretty fun, a lot of the staff here are just local church members and they are super fun to work around with. It's fun because there are a couple members from the old branch I served in on the other side of the city and the other half are here in the branch I am in now with the branch president. We have had a party with all of them. Today we just came down actually to write and polish off a couple things for getting trains and stuff coming in and they had a whole Christmas party put together with the whole office staff and President and Sister Sartori so I just got my writing interrupted by going and eating all this pork and fish and chicken that they grilled up outside on this little sishcabob thing. It was our own homemade Tucano's! I had to turn my little light over to red...I'm about to explode right now. I took a picture and we have some good ones from the week, but I forgot to bring my cord so sorry...next week will be some fun ones. :) We also have been able to work a little closer with President Sartori and it has been really fun to be around him, I think we're actually skyping from their place tomorrow, so hopefully you'll get to meet them! Have my parents meet my other parents.

Other than that, we had time to get a couple lessons in and were able to go meet with this girl that we had found knocking named Yolandia after some play. She was so cool but we didn't find another man so we sat out in the stair well of her apartment and she sat inside and we taught her. Haha pretty funny, but she was pretty into it so we are super excited to meet with her. We also have a few others and an investigator that was already here working for baptism, so we are going to be having some great stuff going on in this area! Man it's so fun. We also had a big Christmas activity on Saturday at our branch combined with the other branch here in Samara...they put on a show for us and let me tell ya...I was not in Kansas anymore Toto. There is definitely a different taste for entertainment around here and they were doing some musical thing that was so darn funny, but they all love it. One of the songs was President Bogdanov in the mission presidency singing "we love boogy woogy". It was so darn funny with his thick Russian accent just belting out "Boogy Voogy!" We were dyin’. Church was also a good time, it's really fun to be in this branch because I have come down a couple times for different activities that I already knew some of the members so church was really fun yesterday and it didn't require much adjustment. So it's just been a really good week this week despite the cold and with a lot of new things going on.

As I said, I don't really know exact temperatures and things, but all I know is that it is so darn cold here. Its pretty fun. Luckily I have my fur enveloping my head, so I don't have too much to worry about. :) Just thought you would like that report.

Well besides that, I am super lookin’ forward to seein’ you all tomorrow! I've definitely had my time to think about a lot of things over the past week with it being Christmas and the unbelievable fact that I've been gone a year. There's definitely not much more to do than just keep on doing whatever the Lord expects of us, so that is the goal for the next year. That's something I've learned a lot of on my mission, and then it is amazing the changes that have taken place in my life as I have tried to simply do my best for Him. There are a lot of things in life I will do a lot better as a result of my mission. I hope that this continues for the second half of my adventure and I sure can't wait for it cause I can control that. I have loved my mission so much.

Have a good time today and we will see you tomorrow!

Love

Elder Nielson