MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Merry Christmas everybody!  I hope your holiday season (the Yuletide as the Brits say) has been great!  Take some time to reflect on our Savior and the sacrifice He made for us.  Christmas is a time of the year that is special for many reasons, but the most important reason and the cause for all of this is Jesus Christ.

Well, we had an exciting week as always!  One of the highlights was the live nativity!  It turns out they only had 2 wise men so I was promoted from shepherd to King, which was pretty cool.  I also got an upgrade from a baby goat to an alpaca!  It was brilliant!  He looked pretty Rastafarian though.  He had weird alpaca dreads covering his eyes.  Unfortunately I didn't get a really good picture with him but I'll attach what I did get.  The event was pretty big though, we had a little more than 150 people there we think.  Most of them weren't members.  Cool, eh?

On Friday we went to Gloucester to watch the YSA Face-to-Face event from September and that was loads of fun.  We also had a white elephant gift exchange which I totally forgot about so the morning before this happened I was looking around the flat and what did I find?  A textbook that was like 850 pages long detailing the history of Ukraine.  Perfect!  I also put a coloring book with it though so there would be something people actually wanted lol......maybe.  I ended up with a chocolate bar and a sheet of sandpaper.  It was a day of good fun!

Yesterday at church our Branch gave us these massive gift bags with stuff from loads of members.  I am seriously in the best branch!  Our tree is looking a lot more exciting now that we have picked stuff up and the members have given us things.  It's a good Christmas!

Well sorry if I don't get to some emails but we have a pretty busy day and even though it's Christmas it is still also P Day so we can only email today.  Oh well, we always have next week!  I'm so excited to Skype my family!  Talk to you guys soon!

Merry Christmas all!  I hope that everybody has a very special day and that you are able to make some time for the Savior, even if it's just a few minutes.  Love you all!!!

-Elder Lott

My White Elephant Gift

                      

With Elder Bassett, one of my ZLs.  

We found a shop that sells Arizonas!!  It was awesome!  #kiwistrawberry

Me with the tree

The Nativity Squad

Me with my trusty alpaca

A King and some random Shepherd (Elder Staheli)

Yo Yo Yo, it's that time of the week again!  🤙🤙🤙

Well, as far as weeks go this was a pretty basic one.  We have been doing loads of finding because all of our gators got baptized.  #blessed.  That's kind of tough because a lot of English  people are salty deep down....and on the surface as well, now that I think about it.  We were door knocking in this town on Saturday and we could see people in their homes through the windows as we approached the door but they would never come answer.  We knocked probably 30-35 doors but only had like 2 or 3 people answer so we went somewhere else.  haha!

I also went to my first multi-zone conference.  It was party time!  I got to see some of my greenie buddies from the MTC and like half my MTC district, which was great.  There were some real legends there!  As part of the conference though each zone did a skit based on the 12 Days of Christmas.  The Merthyr and Cardiff Zones were okay, but then up came Cheltenham which is, of course, the best zone in the missioon.  For our skit we did the first 12 days of my mission.  The idea was to have the first 11 days be total rubbish and then the 12th day had something good happen which comes from D&C 58:4 which basically says that blessings come after trials.  Sounds good, right?  Well the Zone Leaders called on like Monday (the conference was on Thursday) to see if I would do it and then they wrote up a script and stuff but didn't send it to us so Elder Staheli and I had no idea what was going on until like 10 minutes before we were supposed to do it.  I took a picture of another missionary's screen who had the script and I could barely read one of the pages because it was all blurry.  Anyway, we got up there and totally free styled it but it was the best of the skits, of course.  

Well hey!  That's about it I think.  This week was pretty basic so nothing too exciting.  All the snow has melted so it's not so Christmasy any more and that's too bad, but that's the way England is!  We do have that live nativity on Wednesday so that'll be party time as well.  

Next Monday is Christmas!  Life is exciting!  I also got a sweet Christmas Tree with some sweet ornaments!  Love y'all!  Cheers!

-Elder Lott 

Thanks to everyone who wrote on one of the ornaments on the tree. Love you all!

THERE'S SNOW WAY!!!

Heya!! Oh man, exciting stuff this time around!  Let's get into it!

Well hey, if you couldn't guess by the title, we got snow!!  Woohoooo!  ❄❄❄❄❄  It's pretty cool.    We were talking to people in Monmouth and they said that this is the first time it has snowed in about 4 years!!  I never thought I'd be this excited for snow.  lol.  It snowed a little bit on Friday and then not at all on Saturday but we woke up on Sunday and it was crazy town!  I say crazy town, but keep in mind it doesn't snow here often so when compared to Utah it's nothing.  We had like maybe 2 inches yesterday and that was enough for them to cancel church!  ha ha.  It's been exciting though!

You wanna know what else happened?  Somebody rear ended us!  Don't worry Mom, we are fine, but we weren't expecting that!  The back of the car is a little cracked but other than that nothing seemed wrong.  We later found out that the sensor in the boot was a little off so the car thought it was open and we really had to slam it shut.  So, after a lesson we were putting our stuff away and I shut the boot pretty hard and WAPOW! The license plate went soaring off the car!  Turns out they attach them here with sticky pads, so that's something.  We didn't have anything to attach it back to the car with, so we were going for a solid 6-7 hours with no plate lol.  We had to drive all the way to Hereford to get the stuff we needed, which is the next area over.  We also found out that evening that there was a rubber band in front of the sensor and that's why it wasn't working....

We also got a super dodgy call!  The day after the crash we got a call from the insurance.  I was like yeah, whatever, it's a normal thing to happen after a crash, so I was just chilling there while Elder Staheli was talking to this dude.  Well, he got off the phone and told me it was a weird phone call but it was also his first time with an insurance claim so I just thought it was inexperience.  He then called Elder Veater, our automobile director dude, and was telling him what happened.  Turns out this insurance dude gave Elder Staheli a script for the real insurance call which will be today.  We aren't answering though unless Elder Veater calls and tells us to because it's really weird.  He was telling us to lie about injuries and all sorts of stuff that didn't happen.  Honesty is the way to go though, so of course we aren't saying anything that dude told us to.  It was seriously weird level 9000.

We also put up a Christmas tree which is super cool!  It's super weak though and we didn't have enough lights so the top part of the tree is pretty dark haha.  It's better than nothing though!  Also, our Branch does a live nativity each year and your boy will be a shepherd.  I might even get a sheep (it might be a pygmy goat) to lead in the show which would be pretty big time.

Hey I think that's all!  Keep being your awesome selves and do something good for another person this Christmas season!    #LightTheWorld am I right?  Love y'all!  Cheers!

-Elder Lott

Our Christmas Tree!

After the Snow......

This is super late, but this is the first door I knocked

as a Missionary! (nobody was home lol)

BAPTISM #2 AYO!!!

Well here we are again!  Exciting stuff my dudes!  An exciting week it has been for sure!  We were able to get through all of the discussions with Crystal so she got baptized on Friday!  Elder Staheli baptized her and I was able to confirm her yesterday in Sacrament Meeting.  It has been incredible seeing her change over the last month and a half.  I wasn't able to see that very much with Ben and Kerry because I got here right before they were baptized, but seeing it with Crystal has been so cool.  The Gospel has made her so much happier!

Richard Hammond lives in our area I guess.  I don't know who that is really, but apparently he's a big deal and Elder Staheli was flipping out about it.  He said that he's the guy from the show Top Gear, but I've never really watched it.  We were at a DA (Dinner Appointment) and this family told us where he lives so we dropped by.  Turns out he lives in a full on flipping castle with a gate and stuff.  So we buzzed in and that didn't work, but there was a number to call on the gate so we called that and his butler answered!  Turns out Hammond is in Switzerland filming a show but he said we can come back in a few weeks when he gets back.  Elder Staheli was feeling pretty good about himself and was telling members about it and one of them told us that he got in a crash and rolled his car and is now in a hospital in Switzerland!  I still don't know who this dude is so I don't really care, but Elder Staheli is acting like he just met the Prophet or something.

Well, I don't think much else happened this week.  Do something cool this week.  Help somebody out!  Do something good! Love you all and hope that everything is great!  Sorry I don't have more pictures Mom!

-Zach

Crystal's Baptism