Christmas Sweets

I'm not one of those people who feels an overload of sugar too quickly. (Dang it!) I can eat lots of dessert--way too much in fact--without getting sick. And we've had an abundance of goodies around here thanks to the kindness of neighbors, friends, and Alan's coworkers. But it has also been a pleasure to get all the pictures from people I love at this time of year. Especially nice have been the personal notes. They are amazingly few this year--I guess it's hard to put that much time into just one friend when you've got huge social networks--but the ones I've gotten I've collected and treasured. I have some dear notes sitting in my email inbox that I can't bear to delete from friends that I haven't seen in much too long and a glowing report card for motherhood from my amazing sister who remembers that I thrive on that kind of thing.

And my mother told me I just don't blog enough. That was so cute. I feel like I blog just enough to document what's going on around here without becoming absolutely tiresome to my three or four readers. She wanted to see a picture of the bracelets my counselor and I made for the young women for Christmas, so here they are. Remember, the gold is for virtue, which is new this year. The other colors are just what they've always been: faith is white, divine nature is blue, individual worth-red, knoweldge-green, choice and accountability-orange, good works-yellow, and integrity-purple. I also gave them a copy of an amazing talk by Elder Holland about virtue.