Frohe Weinachten! Merry Christmas!

We have practiced saying Merry Christmas to everyone we meet this week. I think I have the gutteral part of the work down but I still have to pause and think about the pronunciation before saying it. Everyone is very patient. They love teaching us new quick phrases to learn.

This past week has been another busy one for us.  We did have some down time with car stuff, German registration (we now have our official German Registration cards so we are official until Nov 2026) and we had some days where we just got too tired to stay so long. 

We are feeling our age catching up with us for sure. 

We have been able to get a good amount of digitizing done ending the week with 22,000+ images to send in, but still have not had five full days of no problems, interruptions or health issues so we don't know how many images we will actually be able to do. Hopefully after the first of the year. Our biggest problem is the time it takes for Ed's machine to transfer to the hard drives. A good ten minutes per file and each file has between 300-600 images so it takes 2-3 times longer to transfer the same number of images than mine does. We had a lot of down time last week because we had in person and over the phone tech people trying to figure out why this was happening. Hopefully we can come up with a solution for the new year. 

In the forground are books we have completed. Ed will only have a few left on the wagon next to him. Each of these books is about 500 records. They weigh about 7lbs each.

This was my "wagon". I only have 5 books remaining to complete on of this group. 

Each Monday morning we walk our little box holding our two hard drives to the UPS store to send to Frankfurt. On our way home Monday we were treated to a little bit of snow.

This was not the first snow of the year, and it wasn't very much, but it was fun to be out and about when the snow came for a few minutes anyway. Mostly we have had rain and we will not have a white Christmas, but that is okay. We are in a beautiful place.

We had a surprise delivery from a wonderful Bielefeld Ward member after Church today. 

They apparently want to make sure we have enough food so two large bags of various food items were collected and brought to us. So sweet! 

We have been thinking about what we might do for a special meal on Christmas Day (25th) and Boxing Day (26th) because we have been told that here in this little town everything will be closed! Ed checked out one restaurant at a hotel that will be opened, but there is no room at that inn! (BTW it is called the Detmolder Hof :) 

Our name didn't make any difference there...

Obviously we have plenty of food at home, but we thought we would check out local fare.

We also have lots of liquid....

Nora only drinks still water 😊

We hope you each feel the joy and peace of our Savior Jesus Christ. We have enjoyed looking for ways to light the world with His Love this season. Thank you for sharing yours with us!