Joy to The World!

This week we celebrated the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ.  Never have we been more grateful for his birth, life, sacrifice, and resurrection.  Because of Him we know our families will someday be reunited for eternity.  On Friday, December 29, 2017 at about 8 pm Sue's mother, Mary Jane Miner Hansen Knights, passed away unexpectedly, but peacefully, in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was 91 years old and had lived an exemplary life. The last two years she'd become frail because of pinched nerves in her back that made walking difficult, but before that she was 88 going on 50. She enjoyed a wonderful family Christmas Party in her home on December 23 with many of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren around her. We will miss her happy spirit terribly, but are grateful she passed on easily and is back with other family she loves so much. Because Sue is in Russia and her two sisters, Carol and Louise, are in Malaysia and Alaska right now, we are going to have a memorial service for Mom in February when we can all get home.

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This week started with Christmas Eve dinner at our apartment with 4 of our local volunteers.  We had Sisters Mohlman and Camano and Elders Tribe and Wallace.

We have one step up to go out our kitchen door to the balcony.  
Sister Camano liked standing on that for the  photo to be as tall
as the rest of us.

Christmas morning all of us who live in the apartments around the Stake Center and Mission Office gathered to share the joy and presents and breakfast. That included the six from the night before, and also President and Sister Rawson with the Assistants, Elders Jensen and Franckowiak. (France ko' vee ack) Sue has been busy since October knitting warm hats for everyone. No, we are not all praying, but are showing off the hats.  

We all opened presents sent from home--except Elder Tribe who couldn't wait that long and had already opened his the week before.   Then we had pot-luck breakfast. Elders Tribe and Wallace had gotten up and out early and taken the subway to McDonald's to bring their contribution--Sausage McMuffins!

A favorite was 'Ring the Antlers' sent by Elder Jensen's mom. It was plastic blow-up antlers with plastic blow-up rings. The rings were hard to get onto those little antlers! And Elder Jensen would move his head around--to help or hinder?

In the afternoon it was floorball, of course.  Christmas was Monday, Preparation Day, so there is usually a floorball game on Monday afternoons.  This week even Ken and President Rawson got in on the action.  


Later on Christmas Day Ken came home and was working on his computer when there was a brief power outage--just enough to blink the lights and ruin the solid state hard drive on his Mac Mini computer. So his belated Christmas present will be a new hard drive. He was able to boot the computer from the network and an external drive, so he knew the CPU was OK. Most of his work is backed up to iCloud, Google Drive and DropBox--but not the originals to videos. Those are too large to back up. He had just finished two major editing projects and uploaded them to YouTube, so we do have the finished videos--just not all the stuff that ended up "on the editing room floor." One was the Mission Talent Show, which we linked to last week. The other was the Christmas present for our son Keith, daughter Rachel and her family. A year ago we were all in The Holy Land and Egypt together.  This is the video of that trip.

Thursday afternoon we got onto this high-speed train and headed to Helsinki, Finland. It was time for our quarterly visa trip.  Instead of the usual five-hour round-trip in a van to Estonia and back (20 minutes in Estonia), we bought each other the Christmas gift of a trip to Helsinki to see the sights, and most importantly, attend the LDS Temple there. The train gets up to almost 220 km/hour--that's about 135 mph. It makes the trip in 3.5 hours. It takes 4.5 hours to drive it in a car--if there is no traffic.

Helsinki Temple at Sunrise -- 10 o'clock in the morning

There is no LDS Temple in Russia because temples are only open to active, observant members of our Church. Russia requires all churches to be open to the public. When a new temple is built, it is always open to the public for a few weeks, so what is inside is not so secret. But after it is dedicated as a House of the Lord, it is a sacred place where the cares and evils of the world are left behind.



On Thursday evening we were picked up by Richard and Elise Smith. Richard's brother David is married to Sue's sister Carol. Elise moved from Finland to the US as a teenager, and then later married Richard who had served as a young missionary in Finland. They are now back serving in the Temple, and they have previously served other missions in Finland. They drove us all around Helsinki to show us the sights and tell us the history. They were wonderful!! They were in Helsinki serving when the Temple there was dedicated in 2006. They told us that in the few weeks the Temple was open they had over 58,000 visitors! They also told us that they are grateful for all those who come from Russia to work and worship in the Helsinki Temple. It has forged a bond in many ways between these two countries that have been enemies in the past.



Where temples have patrons who must travel long distances, the LDS Church builds a small hotel for the Temple guests. This is looking down the stairs from the Temple on the hill to the guest house. We had a nice room for two nights. The rates are inexpensive, but you are expected to clean the room before you leave. When Smiths served an earlier mission here, they lived here, too. But now there are so many visitors coming that they've moved the missionaries to apartments about 2 km away so there is more room for the guests. That's a good thing!

Friday we spent most of the day in the Temple, and it was wonderful. We attended two sessions--one in Finnish and one in Russian. And we did some proxy Temple marriages and proxy sealings in between. But there are headsets with translation in several languages. Ken listened to the morning in German and to English in the evening. Sue did it the other way around. We both commented that the German was so easy to understand! We each tried to listen to a little in Russian, but couldn't understand enough to make it worthwhile. It was just a pleasure to be there and bask in the Holy Spirit.

And we are so grateful that we live close to a Temple in Oakland, California. We can hop in the car and be there in an hour or so.  But that Temple is closing for a year in February for major remodeling.  Ken was in high school when it was originally dedicated in 1964 and attended the original dedication. There will be an Open House before it is rededicated in 2019. We sure hope many of you reading this and who live in Northern California will take the opportunity to visit the Temple during the upcoming Open House.

Saturday morning we woke up to an email from Sue's sister Louise that said to call her ASAP. We phoned and got the news that Mom had passed away just an hour before. So we spent some time calling the sisters and our children and sharing our love for Mom. But then we got the apartment cleaned and out we went to see the sights of Helsinki.  

Main Railway station of Helsinki

We really appreciated the orientation that Richard and Elise had given us on Thursday.  Now we could walk around and see things up close and in the daylight. Well, sort of daylight. It would drizzle for five minutes and then we'd have blue sky for a while, then more rain.  But even when the clouds parted we never did see the sun; it was always too low behind the buildings.  Sunrise was about 10 am. Sunset was just after we left at 3 pm.

This is the large Lutheran Cathedral in the city center on the top of a hill. It is a beautiful church.  










Richard and Elise had taken us inside on Thursday evening when a choir was rehearsing Bach's Magnificat --with Jazz instruments!











Just a few blocks away on another hill is the Russian Orthodox Church of Helsinki. Finland was under Russian control from about 1808 to 1917. This year they celebrated their 100th anniversary of Independence. It's a big deal to them!

Helsinki is a beautiful city.  And like many modern cities, if you walk around and look at the ground floor, they all look alike. They are remodeled into the same stores as in San Francisco and St. Petersburg. But if you look up higher at the buildings, the original architecture is still there, and it is wonderful. We loved this old stone building with the balcony on the top story.






The Stockmann department store is now a world-wide chain, but the first one was in Helsinki. The current building was built in 1930 and has a 5-story tall atrium with a tree hanging from the ceiling. It reminded us of Mom's house. Her husband, Wil Knights, was the store architect for ZCMI stores in Utah for many, many years. He designed a Christmas tree for their home that also hung from the ceiling!









One of the cultural traditions of Finland is the sauna--hot steam room, alternating with outdoor cold. There was this place along the harbor in downtown Helsinki that had sauna and a sea pool. Here are people coming outside in swimming suits to swim in the sea water. It actually was a 'warm' day for December in Helsinki--about 37 degrees F. And behind the pools you can see a large cruise ship. They keep the Helsinki port open year-round, but especially in the summer this area is full of large cruise ships. This year the ice-breakers have been idle--very few days below freezing so far.


Finally, just before the sun went down, we got on the bullet train and headed back to St. Petersburg. We had a good view of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland with its many islands and bridges. 








And Sue spent the trip home like she'd spent the trip to Helsinki--knitting one more hat. Everyone got one for Christmas except her. She's almost finished an orange tube hat for herself. Above her head you can see proof that we were traveling really fast.  

We got into St. Petersburg about 7:30pm, took the trolley home from the train station and stopped at the store to buy chips to go with the New Year's Eve guacamole--but more on that next week.