Merry Christmas!

Hello again everybody! How was Saturday getting Justin home? Hope it was exciting. It feels weird now that I'm the lone Hammer missionary. Oh well. So guess what? It still hasn't snowed. I am pretty bummed about that. It was supposed to yesterday, but it didn't, and it's supposed to today and tomorrow, but it hasn't yet today. It looks like it might, but we'll have to wait and see.

Well, this week was pretty good. We did a lot of finding since we don't have any solid investigators anymore. Peter has missed his last 2 appointments, so we don't know what's going on with him. But, we are hoping to meet with him still sometime this upcoming week. We had some good success while tracting this week. We picked up 2 new investigators. One of them is from some country I've never heard of and she speaks Ginka, whatever that is. She also speaks Arabic and English, so if they don't have a Ginka-ese Book of Mormon, we're just going to give her an Arabic one. She let us in after we knocked on her door and we taught her the first lesson. She said that she was baptized into the Catholic church in March, so she doesn't see the need to be baptized again, but we'll work with her on that. The other guy is named Milton. He invited us in lastnight so we could get out of the cold. He said that he's seen missionaries before and has invited them in and given them drinks and stuff, but apparently they've never taught him anything. We taught him a very quick lesson 1 cause we had to get to our dinner appointment, but he was so interested in everything! He accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon, and we set up a return appointment, and he said that his wife and son would be there next time, and he even said he'd be at church after the holidays! He was awesome. I can't wait to start working with him.

Yesterday was pretty awesome at church too. It was our special Christmas program, and it was awesome. There were a bunch of musical numbers and good spiritual thoughts. My two favorites were this couple who are both amazingly talented at their instruments (violin and piano) He goes to Berkeley and is working in Film Scoring, which is awesome. They played O little town of Bethlehem and it was great. The other one of my favorites was a piano solo of The first Noel. It was awesome too. There were a lot of people at church yesterday too. A bunch of less actives, and the biggest group was the Alta High School basketball team. That was pretty random. There was this big ole' charter bus that pulled up in our parking lot and a bunch of teenagers started getting out of it. I talked to their coaches and a few of them and they were really cool guys. They said that they flew out here from Utah for some tournament, and wanted to come to church. I thought that was pretty awesome. Needless to say, church was really good yesterday.

So, Christmas is this week. Weird. Thanks to everyone who has sent me stuff. I guess that would only be the family, and Rob & Wendi. I was happy to see my package from them. It was pretty funny too. a few weeks ago, we had grabbed this huge bag of random Christmas decorations from a different apartment and we all hung up the stockings that were in there. I chose one and put it up on the wall, and when I opened Rob & Wendi's package, I thought it was pretty cool that they sent me a stocking. I went to hang it up on the wall with our other ones and realized that it was the exact same stocking as the random one I had chosen from the bag! haha. So now I have 2 of the same one. That was pretty funny. And by the way, thanks very much to whoever chose that CD that Mom sent! It is seriously one of the best CD's ever. Did you listen to it anywhere before you bought it, or hear about it, or just randomly pick that one? Cause it's definetly one of my favorite CDs. I love it. It's awesome.

You all know that I get to call home on Christmas too. I still am not 100% sure when I will call, but I'm shooting for around 7:00pm here, so 5:00 there. We have a zone activity in the morning until the afternoon, and then we are eating dinner around 4, so I figured that the evening would probably be easiest. Last time I called, we were told that we had up to 2 hours, but this time, President has decided that too many missionaries assumed that if they could talk for 2, they might as well talk for 4. So, we are sticking with the white handbook, which means 30-40 minutes. It would be nice if you all have something picked out that you want to tell me, and what you want to hear me say in Cambodian, since I'm assuming you'll want me to do that. I can't promise that I'll be able to say it, but I'll try. And no offense to the rest of you, but I'll probably want to talk to Justin the longest.

Well, I don't have too much else to say, so I guess I'll go now. Have a great week, and I will talk to you on Saturday! Love you all!

Love,
Elder Hammer

P.S. I heard BYU destroyed UTEP. That's good news. I also heard that Austin Collie tore it up yesterday. Glad to hear he's still doing well in the NFL.