Before Christmas, we went down to Ephraim to spend a few a days at Grandma and Grandpa's house. The kids always look forward to going down, because they have free reign over my mom's house. They call her office "the workshop" because she has every gadget, tool, device to use to do/make whatever you could dream up. So every morning I wake up, I can hear them all in there playing some cute game: office, school, the North Pole. I think they usually waste an entire roll of that white paper used in the old electronic calculators. She has two in that office that get used continuously when we come to visit. The kids would stay inside Grandma's house all day if they had their preference, so we had to "drag" them out to go do some things that ended up being so memorable. In town, the city has an enormous mailbox for letters to Santa, so they all wrote Santa one last letter, and we went and mailed them. We also drove into Mt Pleasant one night to see the live nativity they put on every year. It really is SO well done. It's a silent tour, and you are walking through the streets of Bethlehem looking at all the old carpenter shops and markets (people dressed in character walking right by you). Then at the end of the little street you see the Inn where people are being turned away, and then you arrive at an old stable where you are allowed to walk in and look at "Baby Jesus" (which is an actual baby). Then treats and hot chocolate at the end of the tour. It's so worth going to see. I want to take them every year. The spirit can be felt so strongly there. Both nights the kids wanted to sleep on the floor in the living room by the tree.
