Friends    ----

Welcome to December.  We will have soon been here four months.  Even though it is December there are only a few Christmas decorations.  We have only noticed one place where the city has put up any lights.  In a park downtown there are some small trees that have lights on them, maybe six or eight.  On our walk this afternoon we passed perhaps 100 houses and saw decorations at only about three.  First Presbyterian has put up a Christmas tree that is about 20 feet tall, it is pretty.  But it is still very beautiful outside.  God has decorated the trees!  That remains one of the two most amazing things to me here in Fairbanks.  The other is how low the sun stays above the horizon.

These two pictures show again how little wind there is.  I was looking at a web site that reports the weather.  They gave the wind speed for an entire 24-hour period.  The wind was calm all day except at 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. when it was 3 mph.  Try to match that where you live!  So even though the temperature was in the minus twenties the past few days this past week, there is absolutely no wind chill.

This is a regular chain-link fence with snow about six inches

high stacked on top of the upper rod.

We have been asked about Thanksgiving.  In Fairbanks Thanksgiving is like in the lower 48.  The day before Thanksgiving at church we helped hand out food boxes to people who needed food.  (But we did not make sure the people were needy, anyone who came and signed their name could could get the box of food and a turkey.)  The turkey was important to many of the people.  We were invited out for Thanksgiving dinner by some friends from church.  Some of their children and other friends were there also.  We had turkey, cranberry salad, mashed potatoes, gravy, pumpkin pie, etc - a very "normal" Thanksgiving meal.

In the Native villages, however, it can be quite different.  Common food there can be sheefish (a whitefish, native to interior Alaska, reaching about 60 pounds at most), moose-head soup, roasted goose, muktuk (whale skin and blubber, usually eaten raw, but can be deep-fat fried), seal soup, walrus stew, wild cranberries or blueberries.  The picture below shows some raw muktuk, does it make you hungry?  One small island, so close to Russia it can be seen with the naked eye, had turkey, but it had to be flown in by helicopter.

Saturday we watched a live performance of "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever."  It was well done, the performers were amateurs and mostly 10 to 15 years old, but they did a good job.  I was most impressed, though, with the message.  Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me."  He also said, "If you don't become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."  The story shows what happens when we welcome children (even unruly children) into the church.  Elva was eager to go to this performance, I was somewhat reluctant.  At the end, however, I was VERY glad I went.

Have a wonderful December.

Larry and Elva