Christmas Eve Party

The bishopric hosted a Christmas Eve party for the singles in our ward. Since the other ward already had the church we hosted it at the Embassy which meant we had to recruit other Embassy employees to help us escort. We had a great time. We had two turkeys and a ham and polished them both off!

We are the international ward in Moscow so as you can see we have quite the variety. Most of us are American, but we also have German (bishops family) and in this picture alone we have Philippines, Nigeria, Chad, Zimbabwe and maybe Ghana and Congo. I can't remember, but we definitely have them as members of our ward. Not everyone could come and some people had left by the time we took this picture. Russians were protesting the recent election which kept some people at home and some people had to work.

Levin spent most of his time hunting down people who'd never been to the Embassy before and were struggling to find the gate. And security isn't exactly easy at the Embassy either.

I got tons of compliments on my turkey and Levin didn't even try any! He was always too busy. I did a lot of cooking for it since Levin was mostly in charge. I need tips from people on how to host a dinner AND look nice when it's finally time to eat. I didn't want to cook in my party clothes so I just put on something I wouldn't get too hot in. But before I knew it I was using shopping carts to haul my food downstairs while begging people to watch the kids while I went back for more and I somehow never got time to change! That has happened to me, oh . . . every time I have cooked for people. Obviously I need to figure this out or maybe just start cooking earlier.

Anyway we had a great time! Africans are always late and I always had this same problem in Nigeria that by the time we got there it felt like we were already sending them home.