A friend of mine told me about a church that does a production each year for the community about the birth of the Savior. It sounded pretty neat and I was able to get tickets for us and Lauren’s family to go.
It is very well done. When you come in they have a nice waiting area with cookies and hot chocolate. Then when it is your groups turn you go outside and walk through probably 15 different stations that start with Moses, then Abraham, then Abraham and Isaac, then Isaiah and then starts the story of Mary and Joseph and then going to Bethlehem and then of course the stable and his life, death and resurrection. The town of Bethlehem was pretty amazing. They had a ‘street’ that you walked through and probably a hundred people doing all kinds of things on the street- shopping, looking for someone, talking with friends, selling something, beggers, people doing laundry. It really felt like you were walking through a street in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. It was a neat experience.
We had a good conversation with the kids afterwards too. Aside from remembering what Christmas is celebrating and remembering to focus on that part of Christmas amongst all the other holiday stuff, we talked about the importance of surrounding ourselves with good people and good things. Even though we don’t belong to the same church as they do and they don’t have the fullness of the gospel they were good people teaching a lot of truths and strengthening people’s knowledge and faith in the Savior.
We figured out that he had set the oven to broil instead of bake and this is what a pizza looks like after it has been broiled for 14 minutes. Before we left I was reviewing standard safety rules because they said they were probably going to make a pizza. Matthew was being a little snarky and answering all my questions with the answer, “Immediately call 911 and run around screaming.” Luckily while his mouth was being sassy his brain remembered what we talked about. I didn’t specifically cover what to do in case you broil the pizza instead of bake it but when I asked him how he decided to deal with it he said, “It wasn’t on fire so I turned the oven off and left it for you to figure out. We had cold cereal so it wasn’t an emergency so I didn’t need to call you or 911.” I clarified if he meant the pizza wasn’t an emergency or eating cold cereal wasn’t an emergency, to which he said, “We still had food to eat even though we wanted pizza.” We were gone for two hours.