THE HOLIDAYS IN TONGA

Christmas eve dinner, complete with a Christmas "tree".  You just have to improvise around here.  This is a photo of a tree printed on fabric brought from Utah by one of the senior missionary couples.  Then decorated by pinning on local lights, tinsel, and ornaments.  We visited a Tongan family who had a tree made from a bare tree branch that had balloons and candy and snack size potato chip bags hanging from it.  The children were excited to wake up and rip the treats off the tree on Christmas morning.  

The Liahona Service Center had a Christmas party.  One thing we did was to create a snowman out of the box they gave each department.  The box had a roll of  TP, two pieces of paper, the box and a bunch of ribbon.  We dressed up Milika, our volunteer receptionist and girl Friday.  (Most departments just decorated their box. ) Milika's headed out on a mission (Tonga) on January 16th.  We will really miss her.  She also is our Self-Reliance poster child.  She has a great story about herself that we will be telling in the next month or so.

No football to watch on New Year's Day so why not borrow and rent bikes and dip your rear tire in the ocean at one end of the island and ride to the other end of the island?  The couple with us rode bikes from the Pacific to the Atlantic in 9 weeks, and dipped their tires in each ocean, so this was a "follow-up" ride for them.

Needed to do a little bush whacking to get to the ocean at the other end.

So, 3 1/2 hours later here we are at the other end.  We took our time and survived it just fine.  We had the wind and sun at our backs, it was virtually level the whole way.  That was a good thing, since the bikes only had a high gear.  We are not even very sore, which surprised us all.  We stopped every half hour for drink and treats.  Got to wish lots of groups of people a happy new year as we passed them in their yards.