CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

After a month of hard work we had our lighting ceremony at the Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial. It was AWESOME!
Nothing can compare with being here, but we hope you can feel some of the excitement as we share our pictures with you. Some of the trees took 3-4 days (working all day) to decorate. We had a live nativity complete with sheep and a donkey. Elder Charchenko was working the spotlights and Sister Charchenko was playing the piano so we didn't get any pictures of the program. He did a great job of the lights and the nativity turned out perfectly.



Over 350 people attended each night. We served donuts and hot chocolate to everyone there.

I planned to get pictures of the nativity the second night but a last minute call to bring my keyboard sent me running out the door without remembering the camera. I went home after the program so we could get pictures of the lights.

On the right I am standing underneath the covered bridge all made of lights.


There are two beautiful buildings here. One is the residence and the other is the Visitor's Center.
The residence is the home of the Director and his wife (Elder and Sister Shuck). The other one is the Visitor's Center. The residence is a beautiful home with restrooms and a large office (4 computers, printers and internet) for all of the missionaries to use. The Visitor's Center has a
large hallway, two large rooms and a small theater.

There are 6 of us who have been working on lights, keeping two 65-foot lifts busy almost all day every day for three weeks. I will send more pictures in our next blog. I took a lot of pictures before I realized that you can not take night-time pictures
without a tri-pod. After we got the tri-pod set up, the pictures turned out great, but we were almost out of battery. Hope you enjoy the ones we got. Love to everyone. Hope you had a SUPER GREAT THANKSGIVING!