Missionary/Christmas/seminary activities

We were in charge of the entertainment at the Carlton Branch Christmas party. We recruited the missionaries! So we had a missionary chorus and we called them the Carlton Carolers and they liked the name.

On December 6 we planned a stake seminary youth activity. The first thing they did was divide into teams and each team had stewardship of a long string that was tied to a "flagpole"  They all had to work together to raise the ensign. Interesting teamwork strategies.




Then the teams were sent out to find word strips that would spell out a scripture mastery. They were given a bag of candy, after reciting the scripture from memory. Then they went to various tables in the the building where they found missionaries and had to negotiate a price for the word strip they wanted in exchange for whatever number of candies they agreed on. Then they raced back to the gym to tape the wordstrips onto the poster board with the right reference on it. It was rowdy and fun! They got to keep candy at the end and so did the missionaries.



Earlier that day when the missionaries got to our apartment for Saturday breakfast they found a big mound of candy on the table and we asked them to put candies in the white bags so they could be used for money at the activity. That's when Elder Schmidt asked, "Elder Stratton, are we your elves?"





We visited seminary classes in Pine City and 2 in North Branch.

 Zone conference!

All the missionaries wore ugly Christmas sweaters and these elders, serving in the Virginia Ward, had the ugliest, light up, tinsel hung sweaters of all!!! The red hat has a gingerbread house on the top!

 And we had a Young Single Adult sleepover in our living room.! They made a tent to sleep in and then we had so much fun playing games and laughing. 

 This is Josie, Monica, Erica, Amanda and Lisa.

I forgot to tell you all something that happened to us on our visits.  We stayed in a motel in Northbranch and from there we visited a class in Pine City, one in Northbranch and one in Chisago.  One of our nights there, we saw the elders in Walmart and took them to dinner at Taco Bell. (are we high class, or what?)  The 2nd night, we went to Perkins for dinner.  We stayed talking after we finished eating.  When we got up to pay the bill, the waitress told us that someone had already paid our bill.  They weren't there any more, but they said that their kids knew us.  Wasn't that nice?