CHRISTMAS IN HELSINKI

Christmas in Helsinki...there have been many wonderful moments but still a time of missing family and friends soooo much!  Here's some of our highlights!

The season began with a "Manger Lighting Ceremony" at the temple.  It was followed with refreshments in the housing center:

It's very small with only the lanterns lit but beautiful!

We are with the office staff minus one sister.  The sister next to me is Finnish and travels to the office every day on a ferry.  The other couple, the Frances  are from Kenab, Utah and Sister Horning is also from Utah!  They are wonderful people and have welcomed us with open arms!

Sister Hirst and Horning had a Christmas party in their apartment!  They included the office staff, us, Pres. & Sister Rawlings, and 4 missionaries!

Our simple and mostly homemade decorations!  The  little pyramid is a traditional Christmas decoration in Finland and you see them in most windows!

We actually made a paper chain! 
 Sheri sent us pillow sleeves to add to our decor!

 Simple homemade gifts!

There are MANY flower shops in Helsinki! They only had white flowers before the Christmas season but added red ones as Christmas drew nearer!

Stockmann is the biggest department store in Finland...

the following pictures are their decorations in the store!

The long dark days have been brightened by the lit streets!

The Esplanadi is a park block through the center of downtown and all the tree trunks had 1,000s of lights:

This is the Finnish Santa (have no idea of the correct spelling but pronouced Yolo pukie)  He is standing in Senate Square in front of the national cathedral where there was a Christmas street fair.

We ate delicious salmon and potatoes..but the lady insisted on including some of the little crunchy fish from Finnish lakes.  Paul actually tried them!

The office staff put on 3 zone Christmas dinners and we helped with 2 of them on the 22nd and 23rd.  The missionaries are darling and so appreciative. After lunch the Zone conference part lasted 3 hours and then we had clean up so those were very long days!

Their "appetizer" was a Finnish tradition, rice porridge with cinnamon and sugar and milk!  They loved it...we did not!

Christmas Eve is the "big day" in Finland...we hosted the 3 in town office staff and had a wonderful evening..pork roast & salmon...and Christmas games and stories.  It was great!!!   This is the traditional drink, Glogi...we really like it.  It's a fruit drink  served hot with cinnamon and cloves (the Finns serve it with almonds and raisins).   Christmas day, after church, we spent on SKYPE  which was the best part of all!!!!!

Finally, here is my wonderful companion!  I couldn't do this without him!!!

Helsinki Center for Young Adults

This is what we do!  The Center for Young Adults is located in downtown Helsinki, in a very exclusive area of town.  None of our youth can afford to live near here so they travel up to 11/2 hours to get to Family Home Evening on Mondays, where we have 15-20 attend, and to Institute of Religion class on Wednesdays.  There are up to 50 who attend that class.  

This is the center from the street view!

Here is Elder Roberts standing in front of our street entrance.  The ground floor is the church meetinghouse rooms and we are on the 2nd level.

Here is the sign outside.  I'm not sure what it says but obviously the church's name and hours of our meetings.

This is the door on the street level to the church.  We have to use a key or be "buzzed" in to get in the doors on the left.  Our youth push a button and we buzz them in for our activities.

At the landing of the 2nd floor you can see crazy elevator on the right, and there are four doors in this small space.  Two are entrances to our Center, the one on the left is to our kitchen, and there is one door to the mission offices.

This is our main room with chairs set up for Institute class!  There are also 3 additional rooms for small meetings, and one is an office for the Institute Director.

Here is the center with youth!  They really fill the room for class but don't want other classes offered because they like to all be together.  There are 5 kids in a Missionary Preparation Class as well!

This is the other part of our large room and you can see where we have a large board for the kid's pictures.  We are in the process of updating all the pictures!

The kids hang their coats here and all take their shoes off!  When all have arrived this area can hardly be walked through.  What will happen when the snow comes????

We have to go out to the landing and through a separate door to get to the kitchen where we have dinners on Wed. and dessert on Mondays.  We use no paper products but after eating each youth take their dishes to the sink, wash them, and put them in the racks above the sink!

This is the other part of the kitchen.  It's not large and is  a challenge to serve in!

Here are the kids at our Family Home Evening Christmas party!  We had 27 attend and it was really fun.  Some kids were assigned to share a favorite Christmas song. They played it over the computer on You-tube on the TV!

Each kid brought a 2 euro gift for the timed gift exchange and it was a riot!  We all laughed so hard and had a really great time.The kids are so great, speak excellent English, are warm and friendly!  We are learning their names and they are getting acquainted with us!!!

Here is our chapel.  The chairs can be moved for activities. We have 80 -100 attend our services!  We often have visitors since we are in the center of Helsinki!  Our Sacrament Meeting is translated into English, there is an English Sunday School class, and Relief Society(our women's meeting) is translated !  "The youth are the best English speakers so they do the translating and we listen with headphones

This is the back of the chapel  and additional rooms.  They have a kitchen and 4 classrooms that can be 1 large room or divided into 4.  There is also a library and Bishop's office.

Here is our little foyer to the chapel.  Opposite is a large coat and shoe rack since people REALLY wear coats, hats, and gloves in Finland!

The Center is also used by the mission for lots of meeting, Language training at 6 weeks and 6 months into their missions, leadership training, trainers training, and district meetings that you see pictured here.  The missionaries are so cute and fun.  This day they had an apple crisp cook-off and we got to be the judges! They work really hard and love to teach the gospel!  The office will probably be moving soon out of the center of the city --we will miss seeing the missionaries and the office staff!!!

Well, we hope you have a better idea of where we work  in Finland--there will be many more  subjects to share in the future.  We love you all and miss you sooooooo much!!!

More apartment details!

 

We love our new IKEA kitchen table.  The old one will go on the deck and the deck table will go to a Thrift store across the street.  We are enjoying our "contemporary" style!

Although we have a dishwasher, most Finns do not and this is their clever way to do dishes.  You simply wash the dishes and place them in the drying rack above the sink, which is open at the bottom and let the dishes dry, then use them from here or put them away.  At the center the kids use no paper goods. Everyone takes their dishes to the sink, washes them, and puts them in the rack.

We have no disposal so to avoid having to take our food waste to the trash every day, we keep it in this bowl in the freezer and only have to make the trip once a week.  We are lucky to have a lot of freezer space so we can do this!

We love the look of this building from our bedroom view.  When we wake up to dark mornings, the lights are all on in this office building so it creates our sunshine.  There is a kindergarten next door and this is their playground. 

Our view across the street from our living room is this funny little second hand store.  At 10 AM there are always at least 10 people waiting for it to open.






Our view from our kitchen eating area is the end of our street.  The brick building is a Raddison Blu Hotel and you can also see the sea.



Here is a close up view of the sea.  It is a working harbor and not too scenic but it is fun to see water but not fun to feel the winds that blow from here.

We call this light that hangs between our building and the one across the street our "Wind Gauge".  We can tell how windy it is by how much it is swinging!!!

This man is beating his rugs.  There is this structure in our courtyard for this very purpose.  We found a tool in  our apartment that looked like a plastic tennis racket and thought it was for a game.  We were going to get rid of it until we heard pounding one day and saw a man beating his rugs.  Their vacuum cleaners are terrible and weak so they do this.



Our shower comes with this long hose so the entire bathroom floor can be rinsed.  We have a long squeegee to help get the water down the drain.

This is our view up the street heading towards downtown.  We have walked it often from our parking places or to go shopping.  In 20 minutes we are in the heart of downtown Helsinki and at all the major shopping!

Finally, this is my HANDSOME COMPANION!!!  This is the doorway picture that got deleted from the following first post standing by our street door.  Every day we say we couldn't do this without each other!!!