Christmas! Happy New Year! - December 29, 2014

So I´m just about of time so this will be short and I´m just gonna explain a little bit about Christmas here in Chile. So they have this tradition at midnight that everyone goes out at midnight to look for Santa. However, he seems to slip away every year and they can never catch them. When they finally give up the hunt, they return to the house and sure enough Santa had already passed by and presents are under the tree. Cool stuff. Christmas eve is a lot bigger of a deal here. The people have a big dinner and they have all sorts of parties leading up to midnight. After the Santa hunt, everyone comes back to the house and opens up the presents right there. Christmas day itself is a lot more relax. After all the excitement of opening presents, everyone sleeps in and uses the day to enjoy the gifts that they were given.

Our Christmas eve we were with the Carillo Family and it was super fun. They have 4 kids Vania, Diego, Augustine, and Tommy. I got to play a little ping pong with Diego. He plays really well. I finally took a game on him but he was eating pan de pascua in one hand so it doesn´t really count lol. We had our Christmas dinner and then we had a family home evening which was super cool. We sang happy birthday to Jesus because that is a tradition they have in their family. We ate some cake and then it was time for the secret santa. I drew the name of Hermana Esther and Elder Ortiz drew the name of Vania there 17 year old daughter... Uhhh thats hard. But we found some purses in the feria and they seemed to like them. Augustine drew my name and he is about 11 I think. He got me a sweet looking read tie. It was great. After all that Hermano Carillo finally got home from work and we took a picture with all of us. I will be sending pictures next week. After that we had to run out the door because he it was practically 11 and we had to be in the house at 11. They also live in a pretty sketchy place so we didn´t want to walk through all of that with our laundry so we went the long way. Luckily we saw the exact bus that we needed was coming right as we were getting to the bus stop. So instead of walking we hopped on a very anxious to get home bus drivers micro and got home very quickly. Really a cool and neat experience. 

Christmas day I got to talk to my family it was pretty much awesome. Nuff said. 

Sunday we had a training meeting with our ward and I am so excited to work more with all of the leaders in our ward. They seem pretty excited too. I hope everyone has a great semana and that they take a little bit of time amongst all the new years celebrations to do those little things like scripture study, prayer and family home evening that make the biggest difference. Have a happy new year everyone! Oh yeah HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY SISTER ALYSSA! She´s turning 15 again! Sorry guys she still can´t date. 

Love,

Elder Shell

P.S. Elder Ortiz and I saw bishops daughter before the training meeting and she was sporting the purse that we had given to her for Christmas. Made me smile :) Just thought I´d let you guys know! Love that my family has such a desire to serve others :)