To Cristina from Casey

Merry Christmas Cristina, Love Casey

Merry Christmas Cristina! One of the things that impresses me the most about you is the fact that you're a mother of four and you're able to keep your house organized and clean. Whenever I come over it's always spotless. I only have one child and if it weren't for Lauren I would be struggling to keep it all organized and clean. As I thought about this the saying "cleaniness is next to Godliness" came to mind. When walking into your house you can feel that it is a place that is sacred, peaceful and a refuge from the storms of life. 

I remember feeling this way when Jim and Mary came over and talked to us about their experiences when receiving Davids lungs. That whole time you could feel the Spirit testify that what they were saying is true and of our Saviors love. I think part of the reason the spirit was so strong was your house was clean and the environment was open to receiving the spirit.  

As my service to you, I looked for opportunities to help clean. As such I helped my mother and father clean and organize one of their rooms in their house. I know this small act of service in your behalf will help invite the spirit more fully into family activities. 

Feliz Navidad!!!

Merry Christmas Lauren! Love, Laura

Merry Christmas Lauren!  It has been so fun to have you live close the past few months and to see you more often.  This was a big year for you, as you stepped into the world of "Motherhood" something that changes you for the better, but is also the hardest job you will ever have.  You have done an amazing job with cutie Benson.  :)

The year of serving you began with Rachel asking me to help her with a stocking service project for Women's Conference.  We spent hours prepping 500 stocking kits for the women gathering in May at BYU. 

One of the many youth groups helping prep the stocking kits

It was a lot of work, but also so fun to imagine 500 handmade stockings going out to people in need this Christmas.   Our finished stockings went to hospitals with sick children, centers for abused women and children, to veterans and homeless people.  I thought of you being a new Mom and how your "Mother Heart" would appreciate others enjoying some of the magic of Christmas this year.

Some of our "team" that came to help with stocking making night at Women's Conference.

In the fall, I decided to honor you goals of becoming a teacher by serving a little bit more in the PTA of our school.  My friend Collette and I were in charge of "Red Ribbon Week".  This was perfect because I know you believe in the whole "JUST SAY NO" when it comes to doing drugs.  We combined the ideas of staying “Drug Free” with Media safety. 

Collette and I attempting a selfie on the playground.

Just last week we were asked to collect gently used toys for a “Title One” school in the area.  I was able to spend a few hours helping these students choose gifts for their siblings and help them wrap them so they could take home surprises for their families.  It was such a happy feeling knowing I was helping these sweet kids.  Some of whom are homeless or have recently lost a parent. 

 

some of the collected toys at school

I sure love you and admire so many of your beautiful qualities.  We still have our "Cool Beans Moment" in your honor at FHE each week. 

Merry, merry Christmas!!  I love you.

Laura

To Ben from Lauren

Merry Christmas, Ben!

To be honest, when I had your name assigned to me for this Christmas Service, I was so stumped on how to proceed.  You have many talents, but what immediately comes to mind is your contracting and construction experience, which is not something I have particular interest or talent in. So I started pondering what I should do. One week in July, I was particularly fixated on deciding on my service project, so I began to pray intently to know what I should do as a service. I prayed to know who was in need of a Ben-like service. That week I was able to attend my nephew Austin's endowment in the Provo City Center Temple.  That session was one that was eternally memorable for a number of reasons.  The main reason though was that during the session the heavens truly opened and I received revelation on a number of areas of my life, but most relevant to this post was on what to do for my service.

Something that really has impressed me about you is your monthly firesides (or as close to that schedule as you are able to get) for the youth in our family.  I don't quite fit the requirements for being a youth anymore so I hadn't been to any of these firesides, but I was invited to be a guest on a panel discussion for the fireside this past Valentines Day. It really impressed me that you had such a desire to instill the doctrines and teachings of the gospel during this critical decision-making time of these teens' lives.  While I was in the temple that day I knew that this was something that I needed to implement for my Schow nieces and nephews.

We started in September and have had monthly firesides on each third Sunday of the month since then with our youth aged nieces and nephews. Our lessons, like Ben's, focus on the teachings in the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet and as we continue, we will get into Preach My Gospel. It's been an amazing chance to get to know my nieces and nephews on a spiritual level and help them understand more clearly who they truly are and what they need to be about. Here is a picture from our December fireside last Sunday and we were missing two of our nephews weren't able to come. It's also been a pretty cool missionary experience for us all as Pao (my in-laws' foreign exchange student from Thailand) has attended all of the firesides and is now meeting with the missionaries.

Merry Christmas, again! I love you and am thankful for your righteous example.

To Grandpa, Love Brianne

When I heard I had Grandpa this year I was so excited. There are so many great talents, attributes, and hobbies that Grandpa has that you can do lots with. I was a missionary at the beginning of this year, and I would think a lot about Grandpa as I served those around me, but I could never think hard about what I specifically was going to do in honor of him. When I got home, I started thinking of specifics, but any idea I came up with, I didn't absolutely love.... and then the Cubs won the world series, and ideas came flooding. Grandpa has always been a Chicago fan, and to this day I tell people that my favorite NFL team is the Bears, mainly because I don't know any other NFL teams, and because I wanted to be loyal to my grandpa :D Well, anyways the Chicago Cubs won the world series, and I got the idea to serve fellow Cubs fan in our ward. This particular family I focused on is incredible! They have three adopted sons, and their recent addition, who is only three months old, happened so suddenly and so fast! I used to babysit for them often, and so I decided to make a Cubs themed gift basket for this family.

Grandpa is a very habitual man, and I remember being younger and sneaking into Grandpa's room to eat his Cheetos. He ALWAYS had Cheetos in his room -- never failing. His Sargento Cheese and Town House crackers always went missing when family members were over, and I firmly believe that the reason he got a mini fridge was so that he could keep his cheese near him. (and so that we'd stop drinking his cold water and Grandma's Diet Coke ;) ) Grandpa ate the same foods day after day, and must I say, he has a great taste in snacks. I filled this gift basket with a bag of Cheetos, cheese and crackers, a Cubs throw blanket, some Cub onesies for their new baby, and I made really cute cake pops that looked like baseballs :) I also went babysitting for them and did it for free. It was a great feeling to serve this family, and I'm grateful for Grandpas love, support, and care for all of us. Thanks for everything you do Grandpa! I love you!!!

Love, your Brianney

To Spencer, From Maegann...

For my service project for Spencer, me and my family went to a food bank called Three Square and helped sort a bunch of food for the homeless. I honestly don't know a good reason for why I did this specifically for Spencer but I do know Spencer is a good person and would appreciate me helping feed the homeless. Merry Christmas Spencer! Thank you for being an awesome cousin!

To Kevan From Brian...

after thinking a bit about uncle Kevan and what i'd do for a Christmas project for him, i recalled a time that uncle Kevan helped me open my mind a bit about a certain topic.

i was explaining to uncle Kevan about how it's difficult for me to understand the Palestinian side of the Israel/Palestine conflict. the historical hatred of the jewish people seems completely unwarranted, even in todays Israel/Palestine conflict.

Kevan suggested that i watch the film "Five Broken Cameras" to help balance out my perspective.

which i did. the movie follows the story of a Palestinian family in the west bank whose village was very negatively impacted by the building of the west bank barrier. the "5 cameras" come from the fact that this man bought 5 separate cameras to document the struggles of the village and his family from the barrier. he had to buy 5 cameras because his camera kept getting busted in the coverage.

the film won accolades from many quarters because of the peaceful nature of it's protesting, contrasting against the backdrop of most coverage of Palestinian protests whose goal the the complete elimination of Israel and extermination of the Jews.

the movie did help change my perspective somewhat and i thought i'd do some research for my project for Kevan and donate to peace causes in Palestine that were seeking equity from both Israel and Palestine (i cared not if it was a two part solution or not).

unfortunately, i discovered that peace in the middle east is much more complex than producing a movie.

i dug and dug trying to find a Palestinian organization i could donate to that was not tainted with the anti-semitic hatred of jews that is officially coded in the Palestinian Authority. in good conscience, i needed to donate to an organization that would recognize both the right of Israel and Jews as well as Palestine and Palestinians.

Unfortunately, i couldn't find any that sufficiently recognized Israel's right to exist in order to make a donation.

So, I decided to switch focus a little and find an organization involved in the Aleppo crisis to help out with the horrible refugee crisis. From news reports, it seemed like it was pretty clear and one sided that there was an obvious side to support. The mainstream media kept writing stories about how the existing democratically elected government of the Assad regime was indiscriminately fire bombing and murdering civilians to try to suppress the "moderate" uprising of the people.

Surely i would be easy to find an organization that was supporting the regime change in a way that could appease conscience and give us confidence that we did the right thing, right?

Unfortunately, as i dug deeper into the crisis, I realized that the "moderate" rebels were far from that. The rebels that are fighting the Assad regime (back by the Russians) consists of ISIS and Al Queda. It also looks like there are credible claims that much of the indiscriminate killing that western media is blaming the Assad regime for is actually propaganda by ISIS and Al Queda. not that it isn't happening, but these organizations are forcing civilians to be human shields and will murder the civilians when they decide they no longer want to be shields and try to leave.

so the waters of help in these very sticky situations in the middle east are murky and i was having a very difficult time finding out who to donate to. this service project was no where near as easy as i thought it was going to be.

i had to take a step back and rethink the situation. ultimately, i realized the power of the "5 broken cameras" movie was the fact that it was a human story. while the politics of terrorists and fighting terrorism gets ugly and murky and confusing, the one thing that isn't confusing is that families in crisis who simply want to live their lives and raise their kids really shouldn't be that difficult.

i needed to find an organization that was past the politics and would focus on just the human crisis aspect.

and i knew one that i trusted implicitly to take care of the human need including the unique religious freedom needs of displaced refugees:

Since I knew that the funds donated to LDS Charities would be used both efficiently and effectively without supporting bad actors on either side, I decided to make a donation directly to the Humanitarian Services of LDS Charities in the name of Uncle Kevan.

Merry Christmas Kevan and thanks for being you and helping me realize that the while the political aspects of these ugly situations might be too muddied to really solve, the human aspect is always there and we can always help out with that.

Merry Christmas to Alex! Love Liz

I had a LOT of pressure this year to come up with the PERFECT service for Alex. You see, he had my name last year and did a super good deed. Honestly, I was so touched and I know he gained some major heaven points. So I felt like I had some big shoes to fill.

Alex is a simple person in some ways, and rather complex in other ways. In trying to figure out what to do for him I had several options - a family man, a great husband, hard worker, lover of cats and dogs, gamer, geek stuff, picky eater . . .   Some of my early ideas were really more representative of his wife or kids, so I kept at the "drawing board" to think of something that really reflected Alex himself.

In the end, I decided on something that I personally appreciate in Alex - his love of board games and his willingness to stay up until all hours of the night playing them with my kids. I don't have the patience I use to with board games, and I definitely dont have the stamina to stay up until 2 a.m. to play them with the teenagers. But Alex has both.

Early in the fall, I thought it would be fun to host a game night at our house and have Jackson invite any friends over to play games. I would provide snacks and the space, Jackson just had to provide the teenagers. That was harder than anticipated - high school football games and Brianne's homecoming got in the way of many Friday nights. We finally hosted one game night. I would've been willing to do more had the kids actually played the games. But alas, the games got abandoned after about 30 minutes and they spent the rest of the night goofing around. I think this group of kids needed more experience in how to have fun socially while still being engaged in a game. They need an Alex :)

Well, I didnt want that one night to be the end of my service, so I went back to brainstorming more ideas. Then I remembered that our ward use to do some service for an organization in downtown Las Vegas called the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth. It's not a shelter, per se, but rather a daytime center for support and resources.

"NPHY’s programs stabilize homeless teens’ lives, meeting their immediate needs and providing a safe, supportive environment and a path to self-sufficiency." -

I thought how much these homeless teenagers would probably appreciate some good board games to play while at the center. So I started advertising through my ward and other networks that I was collecting gently used board games to be donated to the NPHY group. I got several responses from my ward and also from the community and even some other homeschool families that wanted to help out tho I've never met them. Some people didnt have games, but wanted to help in other ways. We ended up collecting several bags of clothing, school supplies, and over $100 in gift cards in addition to over 50 awesome board games and card games. I was surprised how many were actually brand new- still in the cellophane wrap. These good people were really wanting these kids to have games in good condition. 

Jackson came to help me deliver these games and the guy at the desk was really impressed that we were specific about the games. He said they had a few in the rec room, but not any where near this amount and not nearly in as good of condition. I didnt get a chance to meet any of the homeless youth themselves, but we could hear them in the courtyard having a great time. 

Thanks to Alex for inspiring me to help provide a little more fun in these kids holiday. Visiting places like this sure makes me appreciate my blessings of family and the gospel. I'm also so grateful for the supporters of NPHY who help these kids learn how to be self sufficient. I think I may start offering some tutoring services or something there soon before we move away. 

Merry Christmas Alex - I hope you get an awesome new game to play this year! Thanks for being so great!