Move over, Dickens! This is my absolute favorite destined-to-be-a-classic Christmas story. It weaves all the elements of Christmas together into one charming, delightful tale of the heart of Christmas. How can you not fall in love with a story that has pine boughs,  peppermint, never-before-told-details about Mrs. Claus (her first name is Anna), an explanation of how reindeer fly, and how Santa gets all the way around the world in one night?

It came from a Utah playwright who told stories to his children at Christmas about the origin of Santa. I love that it explains how parents help Santa, who the Christ child is, and what Christmas is all about. We listen to it every year while we cook holiday food, do dishes and fold clothes in December.

I love the different voices of the two narrators and the music. It is long, be warned, but totally worth it!  You can listen to all 8 episodes here.

The above video will bring tears to your eyes with the beauty of the music and the love portrayed  by Christ, our Savior and Redeemer. Praise God for the talents of the two musicians, Jon Schmidt and Steven Sharp Nelson! May they bring many to Christ with their glorious music.

Here’s a link to a free Christmas advent calendar created by my friend Amy over at LDS Holistic Living. It is fun to count down the days to Christmas, and best when we can stay focused on Christ. I love that this calendar has different levels of activity that you can use according to your time and energy level. It is full of inspiring Christmas stories, quotes, and scriptures. Very simple and free!

Enjoy!

I am so happy that I can finally make bread that looks pretty like my sister’s artisan-bread-in-5-minutes a day, and also have it be whole wheat! I finally took the time to crack open the book she gave me, pictured below, and learned how to add the artisan touches: shaping the round loaves (boules, if you want to be fancy), dusting flour, I use arrowroot, and making the slashes.

She gave me the book a few years ago as a gift, and I kept thinking that I was too overwhelmed how to figure out how to adapt my Nourishing Traditions preferences to the book. The book uses white flour and I just didn’t want to discard my whole food preferences to make white bread.  But finally curiosity got the better of me. Also vanity and pride, I have to admit, and a little sisterly competition. I didn’t like that so far the batches of bread I had been making looked like rough-hewn pieces of wood chopped by peasants instead of the pretty boules my sister turned out. I finally just decided I wouldn’t worry about the fact that I didn’t have a baking stone, as recommended in the book, and I would be open enough to mistakes as I cracked open her gift and learned at least how to shape the bread.

I think the authors picked up on my vibes of desire for a whole foods version, so they came out with this book, below:

But the authors don’t address the concern that Sally Fallon brings up in her Nourshing Traditions cookbook, which is that whole grains have phytic acid in them. This is both a blessing and a curse. It keeps grain from spoiling, but if you prepare food from the whole grain without properly neutralizing the phytic acid, the phytic acid keeps your body from absorbing the nutrients like calcium and magnesium. Sarah Pope, the blogger over here, reports that she overheard Rami Nagel saying that this is why whole grains can cause cavities. After all, if your body isn’t absorbing calcium from the improperly prepared grains you are eating, your teeth won’t be as strong.

I tried making the sourdough recipe in the Nourishing Traditions book pictured above. I even hosted a class with my midwife teaching my friends all about how to make it. I bribed my son to push his baby brother around the block in a stroller so I could have an hour of uninterrupted time to work on it. But mine was a dismal failure, a brick of a loaf that ended up in the garbage heap.

So then I went back to making bread every day in our bread machine. With homeschooling and seven kids on top of normal life things got really crazy. So then, gasp, I started using grocery-store bread, Horrors, I know. I did miss my homemade bread. After my bread-making hiatus I am finally back in the swing of it and having so much fun with a different recipe.

This recipe is not from either Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day book, but from my friend Caralee. Not only is it whole wheat, but since it involves soaking the dough in an acidic medium overnight, it is Sally Fallon-approved. That means it is more digestible to eat and much more nutritious than white bread. My friend Caralee created the recipe. Caralee is a Weston Price Chapter Leader. She submitted the recipe to Sally Fallon and got it approved.

Here is the recipe:

The night before you want to bake bread, mix together

9 cups whole wheat flour

1 T baking soda

1 T salt

Mix thoroughly, then add

 4 C water with 1 T apple cider vinegar or whey per cup of water

(I just started making yogurt from whole raw milk, so now I have leftover whey that I can use for soaking dough. I love these symbiotic relationships of natural living.)

Caralee actually uses 3 C buttermilk and 1 C water. I have adapted her recipe to what i have. Here is her original recipe so you can compare.

Mix as you scrape the sides of the bowl, rotating the bowl as you go. Keep mixing until you have a uniform ball of dough. Cover with a clean towel and leave on the countertop until ready to bake the next day. When you are ready to bake the next day, mix in 1/2 c of melted butter or coconut oil. Then shape into the desired bread product.

For boules, see my instructions below. For baguettes, divide into two and shape into logs. I can fit two onto a greased jelly roll pan. Slash across the top if desired. Bake at 450 for 20 -25 minutes until golden brown and a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

For lazy bread sticks, divide the dough in half and spread into two greased  jelly roll pans. Add desired toppings, like cinnamon and whole sugar or grated cheese. Bake at 450 degrees for 20 – 25 minutes, until golden brown and same as above, a toothpick comes out clean. Cut with a pizza cutter.

For prettier bread sticks that take effort, you can divide the dough into balls, roll into snakes, and then twist. Use your creativity. I don’t have a picture because I haven’t done it that way yet. For pizza crust, spread in the jelly roll pans, bake the same as for lazy breadsticks, and then add sauce and toppings, and bake again to melt the cheese for ten minutes. Pictured below is my white bean pizza using Caralee’s soaked bread dough as the crust.

For boules (the fancy French for the loaves pictured at the top) divide dough into half then half again, so you have four grapefruit mounds. This is what I learned from the Artisan Bread book. You make a “gluten cloak” by rotating the dough a quarter turn as you pull the top of the dough towards the outer edge and then tuck it below. This makes the top smooth.  I can fit four boules on one jelly roll pan. Dust with arrowroot flour (if you care about eating raw, unsoaked whole wheat flour). Then you slash with a knife to achieve what I thought was the “artisan” effect. You can do a cross, or a fan shape of five slashes, or a tic tac toe. I had fun getting my inner bread artist out, but, after several days, then I found out that when It’s time to slice the bread, the tic tac toe design makes it harder to slice. I found out I could just do away with the designs and the bread was much easier to slice. But my sister says it’s necessary to slash the bread to let the heat escape so the bread doesn’t burst. I didn’t know that and with my recipe the bread didn’t burst even with no slashing. Ignorance is bliss I guess. The book also says to bake the loaves with a pan of water in the bottom. The steam makes the crust crispy. For Caralee’s recipe I tried it either way, with the water and without, and found it doesn’t make a difference.

I also found out from actually reading the book instead of just the recipe that the dusting is to keep the bread from tearing as you slash it, it’s not just to look artsy. You can also just wet the dough with drops of water to make it easier to slash. The artisan effect actually comes from the fact that the bread interior, or “crumb” bakes to perfection: a “custard” texture that is not too wet to make it gummy, and not dry. The crumb of my artisan bread tastes best fresh from the oven with butter smothered on it. 

This is the best whole wheat bread recipe ever! Do you want to know why?

Because it is…

• yeast free! A bonus for people on yeast-free diets

• simple, only six ingredients (flour, salt, baking soda, acidic medium, water, and butter) No yeast, no honey, and no synthetic, hard to pronounce junk you find in grocery store bread!

• uses long-term food storage items

• nutrient dense (I eat three or four slices smothered with butter, that’s the key, and I feel satisfied. Try that with your pasty, store-bought bread)

• versatile (you can make this dough into so many things, as my pictures show: artisan bread in the form of boules, baguettes, cloverleaf rolls, focaccia bread, bread sticks, pizza, and even cinnamon rolls!) Once I got into the habit of soaking my bread dough every night, it got to be fun to figure out what to do with it the next day as an accompaniment to the meals I was fixing. If I have soup planned, then I will do bread sticks. If we want Italian  chicken sandwiches, we will do focaccia bread. The only problem is that it’s hard to make big loaves of sandwich bread with it. The dough is so dense that if you bake it in regular loaf pans, the loaves don’t always bake through to the center. Bake at 350 for about an hour until nicely browned on top and use small loaf pans. . 

Bon apetit!

I hope you enjoyed the Devotional done by the prophets last night. You can watch it here. We gathered around our dining room table with popcorn, hot cocoa, and laptops and watched it. I especially enjoyed Pres. Uchtdorf’s story about the little girl who experienced a negative reception for her carefully crafted present. May we all be joyful givers AND receivers at Christmas time. To help inspire you have a more service-oriented, Christ-centered, Christmas, I invite you to watch the above video.

I saw this video last Saturday. I love the idea of the white envelope! I am going to present the idea tonight at our Family Home Evening. My goal is to inspire each member of my family to do something from the heart involving sacrifice and report about it in the form of a white envelope to be placed on the tree and opened on Christmas morning. 

This Thanksgiving season has been saturated with my huge prayers of gratitude to my Heavenly Father for two blessings I have wanted for a long time: 1. a son going on a mission, and 2. no more car payments! Things have been so tight financially for us for a long time that I wondered how we could pay for my son’s mission. Money has been so tight that I have seriously thought about getting some kind of full-time job to do at home. But I didn’t know how I could do that plus my mothering and homeschooling duties, which I am not about to give up. So I have done various part-time things, like teaching piano.Things got even more scary when my husband found out that 75% of his income is drying up at the beginning of the New Year.

Nevertheless, we went forward in faith as our son’s 19th birthday neared (he turned 19 three weeks before the announcement of the age change).  We encouraged him to put his papers in stating that he was available to go. He got his call to Charlotte North Carolina. After much planning and shopping (thankfully done mostly by him and my husband), we said goodbye to him two days ago as we dropped him off at the Missionary Training Center in Provo. So there’s the culmination of the first blessing, and it came on the heels of the second blessing.

On the way to the MTC, our last family picture together. Thanks to my sister Emily for being the photographer.

I have felt the second blessing was a tender mercy to help with the first blessing. It would not have happened if I had not sought out the Holy Spirit’s guidance and heeded it after a prayer I gave the second to last week of October. I am so pleased to agree with President Monson that God is in the details of our lives and anxiously awaits to bless us. I loved his last General Conference talk and his emphasis on taking time to pause and consider God’s blessings, and how he is in the details of our lives. I know he is a true prophet of God and speaks for God. I agree with my girflfriend Tara who said, “Life is not happening to you, it is happening for you.” I agree, as long as we let go of the idea of controlling our lives (control is an illusion) and let God control it by keeping in touch with Him through prayer, asking for guidance and then following it. And it’s so much better if we submit to His will without kicking and screaming the whole way!

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

Ever since I read John Pontius’ books The Spirit of Fire and Angels Among Us I have attempted to invite Heavenly Father into my life more and live by His guidance as he speaks to me through the Holy Ghost. Sometimes this means not doing things I really want to do and sometimes it means speaking up and to people when I would really rather retire into shyness.

Last month, in October, I really wanted to go to a 3 day seminar. I had the money saved to pay the fee. I talked to one person who hadn’t gone and one who had and sought their opinions for how their choices had affected them. I decided I would go, if God approved. So on the Monday before the Thursday when it was scheduled to start I prayed about going. I told Heavenly Father that I had decided to go and asked him to confirm my decision, if my decision was according to His will. As it says in Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-9, I felt a stupor of thought, as God’s way of giving me a no answer.

So then I switched my decision to not going and I asked God if He wanted me to stay home. This time I felt a “burning in the bosom.” I was disappointed, to say the least, because I had really been looking forward to this seminar. I prayed one more time about it with the decision not to go and again got the confirmation that I was not to go. Not wanting to have a Joseph Smith/Martin Harris experience where God gives in to pestering and lets one have a learning experience that involves suffering and loss (the story of the lost 116 pages of the manuscript of the original Book of Mormon translation), I didn’t pester God into changing His mind.

Thursday morning came and I didn’t go to the seminar. On Wednesday, a friend called me and offered me a free ticket to a piano teacher’s conference on Friday and Saturday, including a lunch. Cool, I thought, maybe this is why I was not to go to the seminar. I have a few piano students and would like to learn more about how to be a better teacher.

Early Thursday night, around 5:35 PM, I said good bye to my 16 year old daughter and 14 year old son so she could drive him to his Eternal Warriors class. I was in the midst of dinner prep. Finally when dinner was ready I called my husband to come home for dinner. He didn’t answer his cell phone after repeated calls. We had dinner without him, and when he finally did come home he had a sad tale.

Turns out, my daughter collided with a UTA bus just two blocks from my home, at probably the worst intersection in our town. It doesn’t have a traffic light, but it should. She didn’t see the bus coming as she was turning left and hit it broadside. Thank God she was not hurt and neither was my son. The car, however, was totaled.

This was why I wasn’t to go to the seminar! The insurance has agreed to pay us enough money that we can pay off the bank loan for the car, plus have enough money left over we can buy a decent used car for cash to replace our minivan. So now we will have no more monthly car payments! Hooray! If I had gone to the seminar I would have driven this car that got totaled, and she would have driven the big green van. That van is already paid for and we wouldn’t have gotten any insurance money out of it because it was totaled already by somebody who collided with my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law was going to just send it to the scrap yard but knew that we could use it so he gave it to us two years ago. The rule is that whoever is driving the farthest for the day gets to drive our Toyota Sienna minivan. We got the car after the birth of Child #6. It gets better gas mileage than the big, full-size van, and I have loved driving it. It has been my favorite car. I love that I can haul 8 people in it and yet it still feels like a car, not a truck or van, when I drive. Plus it has all these cool features, like an mp3 CD player that can also hook up to my iPod, an automatic door, and deep storage behind the rear bench.

But ever since I read Dave Ramsey’s book I have wondered how we could get out of our car payment. I have wished we could sell the car but we couldn’t sell it for what we owed. God knew of my desire and has given me this blessing of getting out of a car payment. Right in time for my son going on a mission!

I feel so blessed to have had this experience because it strengthens my faith in God. I feel my faith strengthened like never before. I feel absolutely sure that I have access to the most powerful force in the universe, who happens to also be my Father in Heaven. I am so grateful to know that He is always there to guide me, as a compass that will never fail me. He truly does live and He speaks to us through His Spirit, which can be a burning in the bosom, or it can be a voice in my head, or even a feeling. Sometimes, if it feels like He is not answering us the way we want him to, may we remember Sister Pat Holland’s words, that a “no” answer just means that there is a bigger “yes” answer in the future.

God is always full of good surprises! Just like my son…he pulled out a can of silly string as we said our good-byes and started spraying all of us. FUN! Man is that he might have joy! I am grateful for a Father in Heaven and our Savior Jesus Christ who make all this fun possible!

I love Christmas because it means reading Christmas picture books to my kids every day and night! This is my favorite tradition because it doesn’t involve much energy and I ingest zero calories. Plus, I love to read, look at beautiful pictures and spend time with my kids doing something we don’t have to clean up after. I love to read these books so much that we keep reading clear through January to stretch the season out and brighten up the winter doldrums.

I have a collection of books that are my own plus I get a lot from my local public library. I’m fortunate that I live in Utah and can get LDS-based books from my library. To make the whole tradition more ceremonial some years I wrap each one and put them under the tree, other years when I haven’t had as much time and energy I just stick them in a bag or in a corner. The kids get to pick one each night for me to read starting on December 1. Then I read the ones we’ve already read over and over during the day. I like to decorate my living room with the books too!

Here’s a great quote by early LDS Church leader Emmeline B. Wells about the importance of telling your children stories at Christmastime: This quote is from the December 1901 edition of the Young Woman’s Journal.

“The olden times were the days of comparative seclusion from the outside world, and we had to depend mainly upon our own resources for amusement…In those far-off days, however, the children were as much on tip-toe with expectancy as in the present day when Santa Claus time comes round. Then we had to tell them stories to make up for the things we lacked. Now there is so much to occupy the time that mothers have no moment to spare, evidently, to tell them stories at all. They depend on church and the kindergarten teachers to do all this for them while they, the dear blessed mothers, lose all the sweetest hours life can bring. To sit at evening round the fire and listen to the children’s prattle and sing them the old-fashioned carols and tell them over and over the stories they long to hear, makes one forget care and trouble, and draws the mother and children closer together with ties inseparable that can never be wholly broken apart. The mother, who denies herself this privilege for the sake of some outside engagement, or even to do extra household work, is doing herself as well as the children an injustice….

“Children do not have too much love not even at Christmas, no, not that, but they very often have too many toys and sweetmeats. How many children there are in the world who long, more earnestly, for real love than they do for aught else. There is no comfort or luxury that will supply its place even in the heart of a little child. There is more happiness because of love than from any other gift…

“Above all else, mothers, tell the little ones stories at Christmas…”

So here’s my list of “stories at Christmas” to tell the little ones, plus some links to other lists.

I’ve starred the ones that are more Christ-centered. That means they focus on the nativity story or on characters who are giving and consciously striving to follow Jesus, instead of just getting presents or talking about Santa Claus. The ones that are written by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have LDS next to the title.

A Night Without Darkness: A Nephite Story of Christmas*, LDS

Room for a Little One*

Christmas Prayer* LDS

The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree

The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey* (watch the movie after you read it, it’s so sweet! The movie is one of my favorite movies of all time, I just love the cinematography and the actress who plays the mom. The movie version also made me question, if I am raising children who would be more concerned about restoring a nativity set than what present they are getting for Christmas)

Who is Coming to Our House?*

How the Grinch Stole Christmas

The Little Fir Tree

A Christmas Dress for Ellen*, LDS (President Monson)

A Christmas Bell for Anya*, LDS

Mr. Finnegan’s Giving Chest*, very cute, original story

(Get the version with the CD as the music and voices, including Dick Van Dyke’s, are charming. I found mine at the thrift store for only $3!)

Christmas Oranges*, LDS

The Last Straw*, LDS

The Legend of the Candy Cane*

The Christmas Sweater (based on the chapter book by the same author), LDS (Glenn Beck)

The Christmas Train* by Pres. Monson (LDS)

Christmas for a Dollar*, LDS

A Candle in the Window*, LDS (you can get both the picture book and the chapter book)

Christmas Farm

Cobtown Christmas

Christmas Day in the Morning* by Pearl S. Buck, (illustrated by an LDS man, Mark Buehner. The LDS Church has a video based on this story, made by BYU, called The Gift, I think.)

The Carpenter’s Gift

Christmas in the Mouse House

Snowmen at Christmas

Bear Noel

The Christmas Rose

Christmas with the Mousekins

Fletcher and the Snowflake Christmas

Christmas in the Trenches

On this Special Night*

Hurry, Hurry, Have You Heard?*

Mortimer’s Christmas Manger

 If you click here, you can go to a very creative LDS blogger mom who has compiled three lists of Christmas picture books from 2009 to 2011. Many of them feature accompanying crafts, like the one below which I copied from her blog. I am doing good just to read the books, but more power to you if are ambitious and energetic  enough to do the crafts as well!

 For Christmas-themed chapter books I love:

(we will read a chapter a day of one of these, sometimes in the morning for homeschool even)

Holly Claus (this one is soooo long, 544 pages! but it is a great battle between evil and good, where good triumphs. Holly is Santa’s daughter. It’s a delightful fantasy. We actually read almost all of it after Christmas when we had a lot more time.) The publisher has also released an abridged version in the form of a picture book.

The Christmas Thief* LDS  by Carol Lynn Pearson (very cute story, absolutely heartwarming)

Big Susan

The Snow Angel LDS by Glenn Beck
The Christmas Sweater* LDS by Glenn Beck
The Christmas Jars* LDS by Jason Wright, and its sequel and picture book version, pictured below:

Then there are the chapters on Christmas in the Little House books that show how sweet and simple Christmas can be. They have been compiled in the volumes below:

Happy Reading and Merry Christmas!

Here are some delightful Thanksgiving stories to listen to while you bake or drive to Grandma’s. If you don’t know how to download them, grab a teenager, yours or one next door, to help you. Bribe them with a slice of pumpkin pie! These stories are worth listening to and will make your holiday more memorable.

This is a 30 minute radio show about the Pilgrims from 1951. It has stirring music, poetry, and the story of the first Thanksgiving.

This is the story of William Brewster, one of the Pilgrims who courageously pursued freedom of religion by printing Puritan gospel tracts.
Brewster went into hiding under threat of imprisonment in England and was smuggled aboard the Mayflower.

Here is the story of the Pilgrims by an eyewitness, none other than William Bradford, governor of Plymouth.

If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, at least listen to chapter 4. It tells why the Pilgrims left England.

We owe so much to the Pilgrims and their willingness to face peril on the sea and starting life over in a new land. Let’s make sure our children know that there’s more to Thanksgiving than turkey, pies, overeating and watching football!

Then, especially for adults, here’s a Constant Wonder page from BYU Radio with some episodes about Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

This gorgeous pumpkin pie pictured above was made by my friend Rhonda over here at the provident homemaker site. Rhonda and I attended the Agency Based Education Conference last Saturday. She shared with me how when she was in college, her roommates didn’t know that you could make pumpkin pie from a whole pumpkin. It amazes me that people are so into eating from boxes and cans that they don’t know the origins of their food.

Here’s Sarah, the Healthy Home Economist, who shows you one way to get pumpkin puree from whole pumpkins, so you can make pie! She filmed the video below for Gayle Guyardo, her local NBC anchorwoman.

Then if you want to make a pie, follow the recipe from Sarah that I copied from her site here.

Now THIS is Pumpkin Pie!

Ingredients

2 cups of baked, pureed, seasonal pumpkin (check your farmer’s markets, pumpkin is a Fall crop and you can get one fresh from the field if you just ask. Any variety will do. Really. Don’t get hung up on the color or type of pumpkin. They all work fine in my experience.)

9 oz organic, whole coconut milk (this is a wonderful, healthy stand-in for evaporated milk. Your pie will NOT taste coconut-y at all. Use only the thick white portion of the coconut milk and not the coconut water.)

2/3 cup evaporated cane sugar (sucanat or rapadura work great. 1/3 – 1/2 cup sugar and 4-6 drops of stevia may be substituted to make a lower sugar recipe)   {sources}

3 eggs

2 tsp ground organic cinnamon (use organic spices as non-organic ones are typically irradiated)
1/2 tsp ground organic ginger
1 tsp ground organic cloves
1 tsp ground organic nutmeg
1 tsp ground organic allspice

Instructions

The best way to bake a pumpkin is to first, cut it in half, then remove the seeds and bake, skin side up, in a glass pan filled with 1 inch of filtered water at 400F for one hour). Scoop out the thoroughly softened pumpkin and puree in a food processor. Do this a few days in advance and store in the refrigerator, so making the pie on Thanksgiving morning is a 5 minute snap. Make enough so that you already have enough pumpkin puree for Christmas too. Freeze in 1 pint or quart containers for easy thawing/baking later.

Whip together pumpkin puree, sugar, coconut milk and spices in a large, glass bowl with a whisk. Add lightly beaten eggs. Mix until just combined.

Pour into 2 standard pie crust shells. Bake in a 375F oven for about 50 minutes or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool. Serve with real whipped cream or enjoy on it’s own.

So what about a recipe for crust? Here’s Rhonda’s recipe on her blog for no problem pie crust. I am eager to make one using coconut oil.

And did you know that to save on storage space when preserving your pumpkin puree you can make pumpkin powder? Here are her directions for that.

Pumpkin powder in a decorative jar with directions for making pie would make a great neighbor gift!

Is there a connection between autism and diet? This webinar will help you answer that question. The following is a message from Shula Edelkind, of the Feingold Association:

Dear friends,

We wanted to let you know of an upcoming webinar by the Autism Research Institute you may want to register for:

GFCFSF Diet … What it is, why it works,
who needs it, and how to do it well

Monday, November 19, 2012
at 1:00 to 2:00 pm EST (U.S.)

To see more, to register, or see it on playback, go to (or cut and paste into your browser):
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1858701663335313664

Neither gluten, casein, nor soy are eliminated on the Feingold diet, but a significant number of our members need to add that to the Feingold regimen for their children or themselves. This webinar may help you decide if this is for you – and, if so, what to do.

My three oldest children had a supremely elegant time at the Royal Academy of Zion’s Etiquette Simulation. The above picture shows my daughter, aka Virtue, on the left at the banquet with King Von and Queen Amy, on the right, who were the organizers of the whole shebang. I am so grateful to them for doing this beautiful wonderful event. This is their fourth year and it just gets better every year. The picture was taken at the banquet at the end of the day full of glorious speakers and a simulation, including a walk to the temple in American Fork. The girls were given roses at the temple and the boys got cards certifying that they are “real men.”

This temple holds memories for me, because it’s in the town where I went to high school, and it’s up the street from the hospital where I experienced my first natural childbirth and had my first daughter. We toured the open house for it when my two oldest were babies. Just last month my first baby entered it to receive his endowment. He is pictured below.

After the banquet the youth had a Royal Ball. I just love the setting with the pillars and lights. By this point they had all transported to a different building, the Stonegate Reception Center in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

I was hoping to get my own pictures but I didn’t get there until 10:25 PM because we went to visit my sister who is moving and I lost track of time. She is giving away some cool stuff to me, including an essential oils diffuser, and a wheelbarrow, which has been on my Vision Board for months. Anyway, by the time we got there to the event they were having the last song of the dance. I caught the one above of my son dancing with a friend, Amy’s daughter. Then all the young men serenaded the young women with a sweet song. I was sad that I didn’t see my daughter and my other son dancing so I could take their pictures. Most of these pictures come from Amy.

We finally left the event after gabbing with some friends and rounding up five youth and all their stuff. We had all the little kids with us because we had driven south to go to my nieces baptism and we currently have one car and I didn’t want to go home in between the baptism and picking up the youth. We drove through a snowstorm that reduced us to driving 40 mph so we didn’t get home until 1:30 AM or so. But it was worth it to see the smiles on these youth’s faces! 

On Saturday morning, the youth got to hear some speakers. They met in an a reception center that used to be an LDS chapel in American Fork. I love the chandeliers and the heavy wooden chairs.

The whole event makes me think of the Narnia books. The four children who are the main characters, at least in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, become kings and queens of Narnia, symbolic of how each one of us, as children of God, can become Kings and Queens in heaven.  I am reminded of the quote by C.S. Lewis:

“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. … 

“It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit. … Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”

For you all you Narnia lovers, here’s a place where You can get all the Narnia books on audio for free. You can download onto your mp3 player and listen to these on car trips or around the house. I downloaded these over a year ago and I can see it’s time tor me to dust them off and play them for my little children. You could also make copies onto CDs and use as Christmas gifts. Hmmm..maybe this is what I will encourage my 11 year old with.

And here’s another goodieHere’s a great web site with podcasts full of commentary about C.S. Lewis

Back to the Etiquette Simulation…here are more pictures. I’m sure Miss Jane Austen and Mr. Lewis would approve. 

After that weekend, it might be a let-down to come home to a drab house and regular life of schoolwork and chores. I like what Queen Amy wrote about that here.

It serves to remind me that we can find the godly, royalty-ness in everyday moments by always looking to God in our temptation and trials.

Thank you King Von and Queen Amy and all the behind-the-scenes helpers!

We can’t wait for next year!