Mom,

The temple trip to NYC was awesome! We all loved it. We spent several hours in the temple. We woke up early on Wednesday morning to drive over to Newark to take a PATH train to Penn Station at the World Trade Center in NYC. To start off, over this whole day, I think I saw at least a million different people. There are just way too many people in NYC. We arrived at the World Trade Center. Some of us wanted to take the Subway to 64th which is close to the temple. The rest of us wanted to walk the 50 blocks to the temple. I walked. We got a little lost, but the New Yorkers know their way around. There were a couple times when we were walking through the city when we hear, "Elders!" We wave to them and they wave back. We even got an "Elderes!" which is the Spanish version. That's a lot of fun! When we were leaving the temple, I saw a guy with a "Utah Utes" hoodie on taking a picture of the temple. As we walked by him, he said, "Hey elders." It's a lot of fun meeting other members in Manhattan. We also bumped into two Manhattan missionaries by the temple too. It was cool to meet them. At the temple, we did an endowment session and baptisms for the dead. Baptisms was a lot of fun. Two of us would get in the baptismal font, then one of us baptized the other for ten names, then we just switched places. It was really fun. Also, on our way to the temple, we walked through Times Square again. As we were approaching Times Square, I noticed a gigantic mormon.org ad. It was at least 20 feet tall and 50 feet wide. It was huge!! Right there in the middle of Manhattan! By Times Square! I took a couple pictures of it, but I forgot the cord to my camera to connect it to the computer today, so I'll have to send them next week. It was the ad about Christmas. It's on mormon.orgright now. I also learned something else very important about NYC on Wednesday. It's super expensive to travel there. $2.25 for a one way ticket on a train or subway. It's ridiculous. It eats your money right up! I've rethought about living in NYC now. I don't think I could handle paying that much for transportation every day. I still want to visit, but we'll have to come ready to pay a lot for transportation.

On Friday, we had our all-mission conference. We had a special guest visit from Alex Boye. It was a really fun Christmas party. All the presents that had been shipped to the missionaries came through the Mission Office. There were so many packages! They also wrapped all the packages they got in Christmas wrapping paper to make it more festive. We got a little stocking with some candy and other little things from the Jeppsons. It was really nice. Also, there were some donations to the mission from some other people. They made hats and scarfs for all the missionaries. It was really nice. Alex Boye sang some Christmas songs for us. President Jeppson talked to us a little bit more about Christmas. It was all in all a pretty good Christmas devotional.

Then the next day, we went out to do more clean-up service from the hurricane. The first lady that we helped had a pretty big yard. It's all pretty much forest in her yard. There were a few trees that got knocked over. So two missionaries who have had experience with chain saws before the mission cut up the trees and we hauled all the parts of the trees to the front yard by the street so the city can come by and take it away. We got a couple trees done when it was time for us to go to our next one. We had told a guy the previous week that we would come back and help him with his deck at low tide. At about 12:30 we got to his house. I don't remember if I told you about him. He had a good sized deck in his backyard. His backyard is facing the beach. However, there is a ledge that is in his back yard that goes down onto the beach. He also has a small dock where he used to park his boat. During high tide, the water comes right up to the ledge and there's no beach. During low tide, there's about 10-15 feet of beach. What happened, was when the water came in from the hurricane, it came up over that ledge, picked up his deck and turned it. Then the water receded and set the deck halfway on his backyard and leaning on the dock over the beach. Last week, we came during high tide so we couldn't do much. This last Saturday, we came back during low tide, so we cut up the deck and hauled it out front. It took about 2 hours and about 14 missionaries. It was fun! We then returned back to the first lady and did as much as we could for another hour until the sun went down. We returned the supplies we were using back to the Eatontown, NJ ward, and came back an hour late for our Branch Christmas Party. The party was cool. It was pretty simple. There was a lot of food and we just ate and talked to each other. There was Christmas music going on. It was fun!

Other than that, we didn't do much this week. We've gotten a few Christmas presents from members and investigators. It'll be a pretty good Christmas! I'll miss everyone over in Boise! I also have been seeing some advertising for Les Miserables coming out on Christmas Day. Is that the movie you're going to go see? Let me know how it is!

Love you!

-Justin