The Adventures of Sister Fishburn: High on the Christmas Spirit

I feel like this isn't exactly missionary appropriate but whateves💁🏻 but it's definitely a thing as a missionary to be high on the Christmas spirit.

The Christmas cake a member surprised us with. How nice!!

I know.

I'm mission weird now.

Help me.

Anywho.

Skyping the fam was basically the best Christmas present I will ever receive and nothing will top it for like maybe 3/4 years.

Christmas Eve Fishburn family picture!
Haley in Kichijoji, Japan and the family
at home in Kaysville, Utah.

Christmas in Japan is a little different than Christmas in America, that's for sure. We just had sacrament meeting and we were super excited to see one of our investigators who comes to church every week but she didn't come! WHAT!? She told us she was coming!? So. After sacrament meeting we walked to her house to give her some presents from some members and a card from us (because we're poor and that's all we could afford..). Then the wonderful Skype session happened and those tears I shed were definitely tears of joy. SO MUCH JOY. Please enjoy the candy, fam! Also, big thank you to the family for making fun of my Japanglish. After that we had an appointment with a less active who lives alone so we thought it would be nice to visit her. Turns out it was actually her birthday! So we were real glad we visited her so she wouldn't have to be too alone on her birthday and Christmas.

This week we had some great things happen, as usual. That's just さすが Kichijoji for ya. So there is an investigator family that live super close to the church and the mom and son came to eikaiwa last week and they're just perfect. They told us they would come to sacrament meeting on Christmas but then their plans changed so they couldn't come😔 BUT they came to the ward Christmas party and were able to have a good lesson with Kawamitsu Shimai as they ate (I was at another table and wasn't being completely useless, I promise). They're just real cute and have so much potential and I just want them to have the happiness of the gospel. That's all.

Also, Ward Christmas party was bomb. The ward did a nativity scene and it was hilarious and fun and the missionaries and a few members sang during that. The dinner was a delicious meal of chicken(yaaaaas), potatoes, and rolls.

And Santa came! The kids were all so cute when he came! We also counted how many people came that we had invited and we had around 30 (I forgot the actual number) people come! A bunch were from eikaiwa and kids eikaiwa and we were so happy to see them and they all brought their families! It was a fun time. And Sister Warnick has like 80 nativity sets so she set up 60ish of them for the ward party and everyone LOVED them. It was so cool to see all of our eikaiwa students and investigators get to hear the story of Christ's birth for the first time and look at all the nativity sets and I JUST LOVE CHRISTMAS! I feel like I did not like Christmas before my mission hahahahahahaha I'm just such a missionary.. but I do not care😊

On Christmas Eve we went to the Tokorozawa area and did some caroling for the busy folks walking by. I have never been a huge fan of standing in public places and singing Christmas songs but oh boy, I was real happy watching those people stop and take time to listen to us sing. We had 19 missionaries just singing and trying to bring the spirit of Christ to these people. It was seriously so cool to see people smile when they walked past us. Also, I saw a frick ton of small children dressed in Santa suits and my heart melted. That is all.

Musashino North Zone singing some wonderful
Christmas carols for the people of Tokorozawa✌🏻️

We also had our mission Christmas conference which was a grand time and I quite enjoyed it. We just talked about Christmas and looked at pictures from the year and our lovely Michiko Shimai shared her testimony because she's the most recent convert in our stake and another stake had the conference with. We also did a white elephant exchange and I got a Santa hat filled with candy and I am not complaining. Shout out to whichever missionary brought that. I thank them for the two big black thunders I received. President and Sister Warnick gave us all presents, too. They gave us dvds of this tv special they had here in Japan in like 2006 about Jospeh Smith and the tabernacle choir and stuff and they also gave us these chopsticks that say "Tokyo South Mission 2016" on one and then the same thing using kanji on the other one. SUPER COOL and I probably won't ever use them because I don't want to ruin them. So nice of them!

Our cool chopsticks from the Warnick's!🎌

6 months have flown by and I don't know how I feel about that. Like, what the what? Like I told y'all on skype, it's slightly terrifying how fast it's gone. Dad pointed out that we only have to wait 5 months until we can skype again and by that time I will have less than half of my mission left. I will be at 11 months in the field. SO WEIRD. But that's so far away so we won't think about that. Just the fact that I've been a missionary for 6 months and my mind is blown. It's always blown when a month has come and gone, though so I don't know why I'm so blown away by this.. I'm done ranting about 6 months now.

Your favorite part and you know it, scriptures: Job 27:4-6, John 17:9,
2 Nephi 27, Luke 2:1-20.

This is a long email all about Christmas and 6 months but I since these are the important things of this week I'm okay with only writing about that. As usual, if you have any questions, concerns, comments, complaints, or corrections, please send an email and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

LOVE YOU ALL!!!
愛しています！

--フィッシュバーン姉妹