The picture book I’m sharing today can inspire a new Christmas family tradition. I hope it does! It is by Jill Hardie and illustrated by Christine Kornacki.
This book tells the story of a boy named Sam. He notices a sparkly box on the mantel in the days leading up to Christmas. His mom tells him that before they open it, they have to fill it up. On Christmas Day, his family opens up the box. Inside it are slips of paper, upon which are written acts of service his family did throughout the preceding weeks. His parents tell him that these acts of service are his family’s gift to Jesus. The book even comes with a Sparkle Box so you can start this same tradition right away!
What a great idea! I can see how fun it would be, after all the gifts are open on Christmas morning, to open the Sparkle Box and one by one review the acts of service your family performed during the past month, or even the past year. What a wonderful thing to do to end the gift-opening spree by focusing on following Christ with gifts of service family members have recently given to Him by serving others. This conversation could lead to even more sharing about how service received or rendered changed the course of one’s day or even life. Hopefully it will inspire family members to think about acts of service they will give in the coming year. As the Book of Mormon says, “…when you are in the service of your fellow beings, you are only in the service of your God.” (Mosiah 2:17) You can share with your family and remind yourself that these acts of service don’t have to be anything big, it’s nice if they are, but they can just be simple things that you feel drawn to do that might take just a tiny bit more effort out of what you are already doing.
I started this family tradition a few years ago, but I tweaked it a bit by spreading out the conversation throughout the days preceding Christmas. Every night as we gathered for family prayer, I asked the family to share something that happened to them that day where they felt touched by someone serving them or sometime in the day where they felt the sweet love of God. Some people might have a hard time noticing that, so you might use different language, by saying something like, “When did you feel some sparkle in your life today? Who added sparkle to your life? How did you add sparkle to someone else’s life?” Then write those comments down, put them in the box, and review on Christmas Day. To emphasize the sweetness of God’s love touching people’s lives you could also give each person something sweet like a cookie or a piece of fruit as you talk, especially if the neighbors dropped by with a holiday treat that day.
(Hint: If you can’t find the book you could just tell the basic story as I’ve shared above and get a gold-colored box from a craft store like Hobby Lobby.)
For more Christmas family picture books and tradition ideas, see my other website here, and scroll down to the that says “December.”
You can also get a PDF list of picture books here. Happy Advent and Merry Christmas!
For short Christmas stories to share with your family, get my family devotionals ebook here and turn to the December section.
We read this book for Morning Basket time today. It is do delightful! I highly recommend this picture book for your Christmastime read-alouds. Use it for homeschooling, bedtime, or any other time! It is utterly charming!
Here’s why I love it:
-the illustrations are beautiful, realistic and not cartoony, done by Luisa Uribe
-the story is true so as you read it you are learning history, specifically the history of the tradition of the Christmas tree. The text by author Nancy Churnin keeps a great pace of not getting bogged down by details
-the story is about a girl who marched to the beat of her own drummer
-you can use the book for great discussions, about loneliness, marrying for love vs. other reasons, what to do when you feel different from society’s expectations for you, big family logistics (she had 15 children), and I’m sure you’ll think of many more! (The backmatter, for ages 12 and up, will give even more fodder for discussion. So be sure to read that too.)
-the story is about a woman who shows the power of following a personal call
-the story is full of Christmas cheer, as it shows Charlotte’s desire to make her place look more festive for Christmas.
-it’s just fun!
Here is a preview video below.
In short, I love this book. Your public library probably has it, so go put it on hold. You can go here to get more Christmas picture book suggestions. Finally, go here to get the simplest idea for doing a picture book advent. If you want some motivation for reading aloud Christmas picture books, go here. It’s my favorite Christmas tradition of all.
My firstborn and his wife, visiting from Texas for Thanksgiving, gave me this lovely Nativity decoration from their recent trip to Egypt.
Today is the first day of Advent!
I count it as a blessing from God that last month I happened to meet the producer of the Constant Wonder podcast, Tennery Taylor Norton. I believe God led me to find her so I could learn from her about this Advent in podcast form. Constant Wonder is a podcast that is produced year-round, with various topics to intrigue any listener who has a love of learning about science, nature, art, history, and really, an infinite number of topics. Constant Wonder is the new name of what used to be a show on BYU Radio, called Thinking Aloud. For Christmas time, Constant Wonder has special Advent episodes. Listen to the trailer below. I love things like this! For my Morning Basket time, I love to read aloud to my son from not just one, but two books, that explain what happened on that day in history.
To engage in this advent, just go here every day and listen to the corresponding date’s episode by clicking on that square. So, for example, on December 1, today, listen to the box that has the “1” on it. Of course, you can listen to them in any order or at any time, but the purist in me is sticking to one a day, on the corresponding date. You will enjoy these daily audio files that inspire belief in Christ, the wonder of His life and all Creation, and the celebration of His birth.
This providential encounter with Tennery was so satisfying, as over ten years ago I was blessed to meet the host of Constant Wonder/Thinking Aloud, Marcus Smith. It happened when I called about a used car to buy that I’d seen in an ad. He happened to be the one selling the car. I had been listening to Thinking Aloud for years, off and on, as much as I could fit it in, in the days before podcasts and smart phones, amidst the life of being a busy homeschooling mother. This was in the days when it was on at a certain time every day on the radio. I couldn’t access it on demand via the Internet like I can now. We are all so spoiled now with on-demand streaming! As we talked about the car I kept wondering where I had heard his voice before. It sounded so soothing and familiar! My husband and I had a great chat with him as we test drove his car, resulting in me confirming my hunch that he is the host of Thinking Aloud/Constant Wonder. I was also delighted to discover that Marcus knows my dad from his BYU student days.
Anyway, today’s episode, featuring writer Gayle Boss, is here. You can also listen to it in YouTube. Today’s episode is there. I love that Ms. Boss explains how she found an answer as to why she felt depressed at the beginning of December every year. She found an answer in the Christian history liturgical cycle, and the natural world. Learning of the natural world’s encroaching darkness and following its lead helped her find healing and happiness. She wrote the book All Creation Waits the Advent Mystery of New Beginnings. See the children’s edition above and the gift edition below. They look so lovely!
This discovery of this podcast from a providential encounter with the producer was definitely a God-wink. I know God lives, He loves us, and He is in the details of our lives. He often arranges things as best as He can, working within the limits of what He can to respect our agency, to bring us the friends and resources He knows will bless us. He whispers to us with the Holy Ghost and with symbols, to allow us to learn what He wants us to learn. I have more stories, here, here, and here about more God winks.
P.S. If you want the page of the episodes all in YouTube, go here. Happy Advent! I have more Advent ideas over here.
To honor Thanksgiving in two days, my picture book of the week is the one above. I just love it!
This book is so wonderful because it tells the Thanksgiving story in a way you probably haven’t heard already, that from the perspective of John Howland. John was on the Mayflower as an indentured servant to William Carver. Some little things happened on the voyage, that in total, count as good fortune, or a miracle in my book, to get him to America.
First is the fact that the Pilgrims had an extra screw so they could fix the broken beam on their ship on the voyage. Next was the fact that when John was tossed overboard by a huge wave, and almost drowned, some other people happened to be on the deck who saw it happen. So, they threw a rope overboard so he could grab it. See the book cover image above with him submerged. As John was underwater, drowning, he felt like giving in to the overwhelming desire to close his eyes and fall asleep. That meant death. See video below.
Fortunately, John heard a voice, sounding like his mother’s, to stay awake and not give in to sleep. Just as he opened his eyes, lightning struck over the water above his head. That flash of lightning allowed him to see the rope that his friends had thrown overboard. He was able to see it well enough to grab it and be pulled overboard. How positively providential! as Rachel Lynde of Anne of Green Gables would say.
President M. Russell Ballard gave a talk about this very incident that I love. You can go here to watch it. The John Howland incident is mentioned at about the 7:25 mark.
This book has lovely illustrations, a great storyline, and best of all it’s true! It’s also a great springboard for a discussion of “How have you seen the hand of God in your life?” or “What events have happened in your life that involve synchronicity?” Synchronicity is when things occur close together, that are meaningfully related, but have no apparent causal connection. Watch this interesting video below where RFK Jr. tells his story of synchronicity. I always attribute the relation of the events to God.
I’m going to read this for our Morning Basket time in our homeschooling tomorrow. Then I’ll use that question I just mentioned to spark discussion. Here’s one of my answers to the question I just mentioned, which I’ll share tomorrow. OK, so when this month of November started, I told myself that on my thrifting trips this month I wanted to find a long comfy white nubby cardigan sweater (I have a short one, but I wanted one lone enough to cover my bum), a long comfy beige sweater, and some black boots to replace the ones I gave away last year. Guess what? I found all three desired things at thrift stores this month!
Here’s a video that shows some of the book’s illustrations and storyline.
This video below with the same guy as above, at the 15:07 mark, shares more about John Howland and the family/group he came with.
Finally, here’s P.J. Lynch telling the backstory of creating this book. Did you know that he’s illustrated over 30 books (like The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, one of my absolute favorites of my Christmas picture books list here), but The Boy Who Fell Off the Mayflower is the first book he’s authored AND illustrated? It’s because he was so fascinated with the life of John Howland. John married fellow Pilgrim Elizabeth Tilley, and they went on to have 10 children. Today, about 10 millions of their descendants are alive, including me! I’m so grateful for this man and God preserving his life. Hear the story below.
I’ve shared some favorite Thanksgiving-themed picture books here, and movies over here. Now let’s talk about songs and poetry! If you want to cultivate a family where song, the spoken word and IRL conversation triumph over screens for entertainment, perhaps you could use these. I love that Nancy Campbell of aboverubies.org has speeches at her big holiday family dinners. Maybe that’s something I’ll institute as my grandchildren get older and I have more. I’ve read about that in some of her Above Rubies magazines These magazines are such a wealth of encouragement for homemaker mothers. (You can see the archives here.) It’s never too late to start a family tradition to help bind your family together in love. To celebrate my last birthday, I asked my family members to gather around the piano while I played and we sang some songs. It felt so good to be creating our own entertainment instead of just consuming it! I hope to make this happen more often. In my husband’s family of origin, they had a tradition of doing a family talent show on Christmas Eve. I have loved that! We’ve had poetry recitations, martial arts demonstrations, instrumental music rendering, picture book reading aloud, and much more. I’m wondering, if it’s great for Christmas Eve, how about we do it for every holiday gathering?
My husband carving our turkey with his brother’s help, Thanksgiving of 2011.
Do you want to hear about a Thanksgiving Miracle? Here you go! It’s from the February 2003 New Era, a magazine for youth published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s from a talk called, “Do You Need a Miracle?” by Elder Larry Gibbons. It tells the story of a man, Mr. Bogar, living in the hills of Missouri. He went hunting for a legendary turkey named Foots who was so big that he left prominent tracks in the snow. The man stalked Foots down until he was 60 yards away. Carefully, Mr. Bogar aimed, shot, and hit the turkey! The turkey fell down and appeared to be dead. Mr. Bogar was sure that his turkey dinner was in the bag. But then an amazing thing happened, and it wasn’t until months later that the hunter found out the rest of the miraculous story. The end result was a miraculous turkey dinner for some hungry people who had been praying for food, not the hunter’s family. Click on this link to read the whole thing. It’s amazing!
I believe in miracles! I’ve seen them happen in my life. I’ve seen hearts soften (including my own) and miracles happen when at first it seemed like no change was remotely possible. I know these changes happened because of the power of faith in Jesus Christ.
Thanksgiving is a great time for miracles! Any time is a great time for miracles when we do as Elder Gibbons says in the article:
You have some difficult battles to fight. It is easy to let fear overtake us. Have courage! Have faith! Remember the sons of Helaman. “Now they never had fought, yet they did not fear death; … yea, they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them” (Alma 56:47).
Have faith! Repent of those things that you need to change in your life. Do not fear. Work hard. Expect a miracle!
Remember the greatest miracle of all time. The Son of Man rose from the grave. He overcame death and hell! He lives. I know that He lives. Because of this, the greatest of miracles, we have no reason to fear, and we have every reason to have faith.
I also believe in President Russell M. Nelson’s prophetic promise, here, that we have yet to see the greatest manifestations of Jesus Christ’s power. Imagine! Greater than the parting of the Red Sea, greater than the healings of Jesus, even greater than His coming back from the dead! We have sooooo much to look forward to!
I was blessed in October to meet a man who has a whole YouTube Channel full of miracle stories. Here’s one below. Go to his channel to watch so many more! I’ve included some below. Whatever burden you are carrying, I hope that these stories remind you that all of our hope, all of our salvation, and all miracles come from Jesus Christ our Savior. I hope this season of thanksgiving will help you to find gratitude for everything, even your trials. My recent reading of the Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus Christ, from Ether, with the story of the Jaredites traveling in barges reminds me of the power of trials. Maybe the Jaredites thought the “furious winds” that blew on them while they were crossing the ocean were trials, but those winds are what carried the barges to their Promised Land. What are the furious winds in your life?
P.S. If you want more Thanksgiving stories, get my Celestial Family Devotionals Ebook here and turn to the November section.
I don’t know about you, but some heavy things have been weighing me down lately, even though this is also a season of rejoicing and gratitude. I’ll be sharing about those things soon after I process how to express it all. I thought I’d lighten things up in my mind with a little Thanksgiving levity. I hope you enjoy these videos! They make me laugh! Especially the first one about Thanksgiving carols with Lamar Cranberry. I just laugh every time I watch this one, especially the part about “testing out the strength of my waistband.” So funny!
If you want more Thanksgiving ideas, go here. Happy Thanksgiving!
I want to get into the habit of reviewing a book a week that’s just for moms. I’ve done that off and on, OK mostly “off,” over the past few years. I really want to be more consistent because I love writing all about my favorite books that enrich and help moms. So today I’m talking about this book before Thanksgiving has come and gone. It’s a cookbook by Susan Branch, called Autumn: from the Heart of the Home . I reviewed the same author’s Summer: from the Heart of the Home cookbook over here. I found Autumn at the Springville Deseret Industries thrift store for only $3! I feel so incredibly blessed to have found this gem! It is a treasure!
I’ll repeat what I put over on the review of her Summer cookbook here to give you a little introduction to Susan. Just who is she and why I am sharing her book? Susan is an author and illustrator who lived in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. I noticed on her blog that she recently moved back to California, where she grew up as the oldest in a big family of 8 children in the 1960s. Her mother taught her to bake, cook, sew, tend children, clean, wash, craft, and host parties, as well as all the other homemaking arts. Susan loved learning all of it. She dedicated her first book to her dear mother, who she says was the strong foundation of her life. (You can read about her mother here.)
I’m sharing her book because even though it’s not carnivore, low-carb/keto, or even whole foods-y, it’s just beautiful and fun! She has illustrated all the pictures and written all the words in it by hand. It’s just so gorgeous! See below.
This book has the following recipes that are warm, cozy, and fall-ish:
-appetizers and finger food, like Garlic Shrimp, Spiced Pecans, and Red Chili Onion Rings
-side dishes like Acorn Squash, Roasted Fall Vegetables, and Potatoes Anna
-traditional Thanksgiving dinner foods of stuffing (her grandma’s recipe), gravy, and cranberry sauce
-main dishes like Touchdown Chili, Turkey in the Straw and Classic Tenderloin of Beef
-desserts, including Gingerbread Cake , Cinnamon Ice Cream, Indian Pudding, Pumpkin Cheesecake, and Molasses Cookies
-drinks like Hot Chocolate and Autumn Spiced Cider
-Halloween food
Reading this book just makes me happy! I don’t have any plans to make any of the recipes soon but if any of my children want to make any, they are welcome to it. I hope it inspires them. So I guess this isn’t really a review, it’s actually a preview. I don’t know if anyone else out there loves to read cookbooks for fun. If you haven’t you probably haven’t found a fun one like Susan Branch’s. She has others, so I’ve been collecting them from my thrifting jaunts. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have one called Winter or Spring. She says that the Summer book covers spring recipes and her Christmas cookbooks cover winter ones. Her little comments on each recipe simply entertain me. (Just like the comments that Serene and Pearl make on their recipes in the Trim Healthy Mama cookbooks.)
Interspersed between the recipes are lusciously decorated poetry pages, memories of Thanksgiving as a child with her big family and relatives, fun lists, and pages of tips for gardening, harvesting, food preservation, and having fun in autumn: fall decorating, entertaining with dinner parties, making your guest room more cozy, what to collect when you go antiquing and leaf peeping, homemade gift ideas, and quotes about harvest time and fall. This is just an autumnal homemaker’s heaven in between two covers of a book! It even has a ribbon bookmark. The dishes look like a feast, and the illustrations and words are a feast for the mind.
Reading this book is one way I delight and dazzle my life as Ramona Zabriskie of Wife for Life talks about. So…excuse me while I go fill up a tub for a hot bubble bath soak in the tub and drink in this book!
If you think of the following when I say “family board game”: Monopoly, Life, Clue and Sorry, have I got a treat for you! Family board games have gotten so much better!!! No longer do we have to suffer through such randomness and tedium as is in the above games. I grew up playing all those games and loved them because that’s all I knew. The Game of Life was a favorite because of the feature of having children, filling up the car with the little blue and pink pegs, if I got lucky. The times I played and had zero or one child were depressing. When I won the game with lots of money and children, I felt I had hit the jackpot! When my brother gave me the game for Christmas about 12 years ago, I had to smile as I knew he remembered how much I had loved playing this game in our childhood.
As much as I love the game of Life, I love the newer board games sooo much more because of the increased diversity of themes and choices available in them. The newer mechanisms allow for a lot more choice instead of being subject to the spin of the dial or the roll of the dice. Clue does have strategy I admit, such that I can usually win every time I play, yet the novelty of it has long worn off since I received it for Christmas in 5th grade. I’m sooo glad that board games have evolved beyond the roll-the-die-and-move-on-a-path-or-grid mechanism.
The Dice Tower YouTube Channel recently released their new video about Family Games from their series The 12 Days of Christmas. So here’s the video with some of the games from it below.
Credit for Images Above and Below: boardgamegeek.com
Dragon Keepers
I haven’t played any of the above games, but they look fun!
Now I’ll talk about some of MY favorite family games.
Whereas the ones above are currently all available in amazon or some other online game store like gamenerdz.com, these ones below might not be easily available new. Many of them are old and might only be available at ebay as used if you want them right away. If you can wait, keep a list on your phone and when you find them at a thrift store, grab them!
I love all the “who said what” type guessing games like Loaded Questions, Game of Things, and so forth, as listed here. We played the political version below recently and it was a super hit, especially since those at the table were all of the same political bent. Warning, don’t play it with people who get easily offended by different political opinions or you might have WWIII on your hands.
Wits and Wagers is fun because it’s a twist on trivia. You don’t necessarily have to know the answer, just know who is most likely to know and vote for their answer. I have some gospel-themed versions for Sunday gameschooling here!
You can get Camel Up and Everdell in amazon. Camel Up is soooo fun! You bet on who will be the first camel to win the race. It involves probability, which is math, so hey, this is even educational! Be ready for some rousing cheers and yells with this game! It’s a good mix of strategy, luck, and potential upsets at every turn!
Everdell is just so cozy yet strategic. I love it!!! Read my review here.
Fluxx is a fun card game with the simple rule of “draw one card, play one card.” It always changes though as you draw and play cards that change the goal and the rules. I love it because it’s so simple yet there’s so much variety so that game is always changing, and no game is the same. The basic game is above. Then the game comes in so many varieties: Nature, Family, Fairy Tales, Monty Python, Star Trek, Anatomy, Chemistry, Camping, Astronomy, and more! These make great stocking stuffers!
Just One is probably the simplest on this whole list! Read my review here.
If you like Pictionary or Charades, Concept is for you. It’s basically Charades with just using already printed pictures on the board. You try to get someone to guess the secret word using the pictures. It’s so satisfying when you get it right on either end.
Who hasn’t heard of Codenames? It’s a great big family party game because people can come in and out and you can have as few as four people and as many as you want. It also comes in different varieties like Disney, Harry Potter, Pictures, two-player-version, and Marvel. For people who love word association.
Bananagrams is for word lovers and Scrabble lovers. It’s like Scrabble where everyone makes their own crossword grid with letter tiles, all playing at the same time, as a race to see who runs out of their tiles the fastest. All the fun of Scrabble without the restraints!
Telestrations is like the old “Telephone” parlor game using drawings. If you have the right crowd, it can be hilarious!
Gizmos is engine-building with cascading effects, kind of like in Everdell. I love the little “gumball machine” that dispenses the marbles.
Secret Hitler has been a hit for almost a decade with my children. They went through a phase where they played this every Christmas vacation, multiple rounds, multiple days when the big kids came home from college. It involves a ton of acting and bluffing so only play with people who like that. My oldest child loves it so much he helped build an online version of it.
Pictomania is Pictionary on steroids where everyone plays every round as a drawer AND a guesser! Everybody has their own secret word to draw. It’s a race to draw your word as fast as you can and then guess the other people’s words. Sooo much fun! This is absolutely one of my favorite games! It is a lot of fun when you get a mind meld and can tell what people are communicating on paper, as well as get people to get right what you drew. Similar to the feelings in Just One, and Concept.
Moods is great if you have the right crowd who like to act and aren’t self-conscious. I have played this with my Veggie Gals girlfriends and my relatives. All those times it has elicited a lot of laughs. It’s simple and goes fast. Everyone plays every round, which I love. This is one that’s out of print, so you have to find it in ebay or a thrift store, like I did here. Totally worth it! I have such fond memories of playing this with a brother-in-law, his wife, my niece, my oldest daughter, my oldest son, and a sister-in-law and her husband. We laughed so hard! It plays up to 8 people! Hooray!
I have reluctantly decided that Bohnanza has made my list of favorites after many years of resisting this game because of the forced planting, aka socialist action, LOL. It used to really bug me until I learned how to not let it bug me. All my kids love this game! You are basically a bean farmer, planting and harvesting beans, to get coins. The winner is the one with the most coins. We played it recently for a family game night. I had so much fun after finally getting the hang of it, so I finally decided that I like it. My teen daughter resisted the game night and opted to take a nap (haha, I knew she wouldn’t be able to actually sleep) but later when she found out we played this game she said she would have joined us if she had known we were going to play it. You snooze, you lose!
How can I not include Ticket to Ride? A classic! My game loving son bought it for the family as a family Christmas gift about 8 years ago. The Europe version is more fun because of the tunnels! I love that you can get different versions: USA, Asia, Nordic, Africa, and more. Just don’t get the NYC version. It always ends too soon for me!
Now for a few that I haven’t ever played but look so fun!
How can I resist this one above?! Santa and elves! It just oozes hygge! Learn about hygge here!
If those aren’t enough for you, here are a ton more ideas below! Happy game boarding with family and/or friends! Also, check out the party games here and my gameschooling ideas here.
I just love watching BYUTV’s Relative Race! We watch it almost every Sunday night. Last night was Episode 9 of Season 14. A woman named Precious got to meet her birth mom for the first time! Oh the feels!!! The picture above shows them hugging. Then another woman, Laura Jean, met her sister for the first time. See below. A man named Daniel met two aunts, sisters of his mom. I just love it! Next week is the last episode of Season 14, where we find out the winner for the whole season. Watch the show here so you can binge and get all caught up for Season 14 before the Finale on Sunday. This is a show where I feel the Holy Ghost witness to me of the divine origin of the family, that family relations are sacred because they come from God. It makes me treasure my family more and do things to show my gratitude to God for my family, that I know who my family is and that I am member of infinitely different family groups that keep building through the eternities. It’s so mind-boggling and beautiful all at the same time!
I always feel a letdown after the season is over, because I have to wait for a new season, which takes months. In the meantime, I just watch old seasons while I wait. We watch them on Sundays and I work a jigsaw puzzle while I listen/watch. I always catch tidbits of information I missed the first time I watched. Those moments when they find their relatives are pure, golden tearjerkers. I also comfort myself with the fact that at any moment I can have a Relative Race sighting of contestants out in public. About two years ago I found Layton and Kyle of Team Black at Costco, and another time I found Ashley of Team Black at a summer parade. I got to hug them all and get selfies and tell them how much I enjoyed watching their story.
At this time of year, I start wondering which Teams from Relative Race are meeting with their newly found relatives for holiday gatherings. May they all spend the holidays with who they really want to spend it with. I wish that for all of you as well!
Speaking of relatives, here’s an organic, unofficial “Relative Race” story that involves so-called coincidences to bring about some people finding relatives. This story happens without any DNA testing, race, or TV cameras. It was all orchestrated purely by God! It is sure to warm your hearts this Thanksgiving season, especially if you love Relative Race. It involves some mixed-up mail, a common surname, long-lost twins, and reunited cousins and siblings. It all happened in November time, culminating in a joyous family reunion on Thanksgiving Day! All from a catalog sent to the “wrong” address! God definitely works through mysterious ways, even with catalogs and the postal system! The story is called “A Catalog of Events”, by Janet Kruckenberg. It appeared in the June 1994 Ensign. Here’s the beginning of the story (copied from the June 1994 Ensign):
When I answered the phone, a man’s voice on the other end of the line asked my name and told me his, saying that a mail order catalog with my name on it had arrived in his mail. He asked if I had ordered the catalog or if I wanted it. I told him I didn’t and that I had no idea why my name was on it. We would have hung up then if the caller hadn’t said something else.
There’s so much more to the story! Please see the rest of the article here. I have more posts about Relative Race listed here. The awesome feels of Relative Race never have to end!
You can watch some short videos of Relative Race reunions here.
Tree of Life Mothering 