Christmas time is almost over

Hi Everybody,  Welcome to the 1881 Heritage 

 If you are interested to know what this place is all about, click here: 1881 Heritage

We had a great Christmas activity on Monday, December 26th, for our Sunday Branch as many of the sisters had this as an extra day off.  Most of the activity consisted of Filipino dances which were colorful and well-done.  They designed their own costumes and choreography and did a great job.

If you haven't laughed today and you need to, here's a link to our senior missionary Tinikling dance.  Tinikiling dance 

Here are some links to the dances:  Dance, Another dance, more dances

Dances galore, Last Dance

We had dances an songs and games and a great time was had by all who were able to come.

Here's Elder Chandler busily serving dinner to these wonderful sisters.  He does this a lot as well as set up, take down, and wash the dishes.  He's a great man!

Here is our Christmas choir we had on Christmas Sunday but there are a few extra people in the photo. Below is a link to a practice for our Christmas choir.  This was the first time I ever played the piano for a choir and I was happy that for the performance it all turned out okay.  I'm not that good and I wouldn't have done it but there aren't many who are able to play the piano in our branch.

Choir Practice

Thank you for bearing with us in all our Christmas posts.  The Filipino sisters say that they start celebrating Christmas in September in the Philippines so be glad we didn't start showing these kinds of posts then!  HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!

 We hope you are enjoying parties and family and, most importantly, remembering our Savior's birth.  We celebrated again by going to TST (Tsim Shaw Tsui) and watched the Hong Kong 3D light show. It was pretty cool to see the images displayed across a couple of buildings and on the clock tower as seen below in this little video:

Here's another of the View across Victoria Harbor: View across Victoria Harbor

We also had a great office party with staff and senior missionaries.  There were some great games and good food, too.

We didn't lack for gifts for our "White Elephant" gift exchange.  There were a lot of after exchange exchanges as that was part of the exchange but everyone seemed pretty happy as there was mostly a lot of candy exchanged.

We've also been involved in many different choirs.  This link below is for our Sunday branch and the practice for the choir that we sang in last Sunday.  This Sunday will be our last Christmas choir.

Island 1 branch Christmas choir

To end this little post, we thought you might like to see what a Chinese doctor's prescription looks like; actually it is multiple pages- about 6 of them.  Unfortunately, Leon has been sick so he went to the traditional Chinese doctor who prescribed lots of herbs, insects, and other assorted delicacies to be boiled down to one delicious thermos full of medicine.  Leon says he has a hard time drinking it without throwing up and we believe him as the smell is super awful.  This photo was taken a few days ago and Leon is feeling much better so maybe it works.  We don't think we want to get sick enough to try this though.  Leon lived in the USA for many years and he could go to regular doctors here but he chose to go to a traditional Chinese doctor.



Here's our little Nativity which are just made of nuts that are hand painted in China.  Sweet, huh?
Our wishes for you are that you stay well and you all have a very Merry Christmas!

CHRISTMAS (again?)

Hello dear friends and dear family.  How do you like our real Christmas tree?  It smells wonderful, too.  We really like to walk through the lobby of our apartment/hotel as we can always see "our" tree and smell the beautiful pine smell.  We have no idea where they got it but it had to be shipped here.

Also, do you like these beautiful poinsettias that are planted everywhere around our apartments?  They are really beautiful.

As you can see, it's still Christmas time here in Hong Kong.

I (Carol) also had a birthday this week and I want to thank you for your kind birthday greetings! One of the sister senior missionaries made up this photo frame with my favorite things to do; walking, traveling, making cookies, crocheting, knitting, traveling, and especially, loving the grandchildren! (How about that walking "photo" looks just like me, wouldn't you say?)

This was one of my favorite parts of the photo as I've never mastered chopsticks- isn't that a better idea- if you can't eat with them- knit a scarf with  your chopsticks!

If any of you are our "friends" on Facebook, you'll think that all we do is party around here which isn't far from the truth this week.  We had two big Christmas parties with the Filipino sisters. We celebrated on Thursday with the Thursday sisters and we celebrated Friday with the Friday sisters. Here are some of them decorating.  Now keep in mind they only have one day off a week and so everything has to be done in one day; shopping for themselves, handling their finances, sometimes immigration issues, etc, etc, etc.  How did they ever find enough time in a short while here to make these decorations from scratch?

There were so many stars completely made from magazine pages, wrapping paper and colored paper.  All of the decorations were 'homemade'.

Here's Thursday's traditional Christmas dinner which also included sticky rice; my favorite.  There were many beautiful dishes.  The chicken wings were a big favorite, too.  We don't know how they were able to make so much in such a short time.

Friday wasn't quite as elaborate but the missionary sisters made some great sandwiches to go with the cake and other goodies.

Here's Elder Chandler getting ready for the big balloon popping contest.  We had to play lots of games everyday and we had a great time but we did get worn out. Here's a link to some of the photos, videos of games we played: Fun Times.  Here's Thursday's stuff if you are still interested: Thursday groupWe only have one more Christmas party to go with our Sunday branch which won't be for a week.  Earlier each day, we had wonderful sacrament meetings where we were able to read beautiful scriptures and sing the wonderful Christmas hymns.  I played the piano and that was a stretch for me but I was happy that I was able to do a pretty good job accompanying the singing.

It wouldn't be Christmas without Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus! We think Santa has been on a diet, though.

We hope your Christmas time is as happy and bright and wonderful as ours has been.  MERRY CHRISTMAS! (again!)

Don't forget to check out #LIGHTTHEWORLD this holiday season!