12/27/25
Hello, friends, and Merry Christmas! We hope you have had a wonderful Christmas week with your family and friends. We love Christmas and we’ve had a terrific week together. Let me tell you all about it!
On Christmas Sunday we attended two sacrament meetings. We started with the Christmas program in the Spanish branch. The meeting started with about eight members there and that number slowly grew to about fifteen members.
Elder Benzley, one of our missionaries, gave a talk about seeking Jesus. He shared wonderful thoughts about how the shepherds sought Jesus, the wise men sought Jesus, and we should follow their example and seek Him too. Since it was the Spanish branch and Elder Benzley doesn’t speak Spanish (yet), Elder Monzon translated for him. It was great to see the elders teaching truth and working together.
Next we attended the 1st branch Christmas sacrament meeting. We had a wonderful program put together by Sister Mogenhan. She did a great job organizing the narration and the music. Sister Emily & Brother Ólafur did the narration in both English & Icelandic. The missionaries joined the primary children to sing “Star Were Gleaming”.
Karen conducted the music and President Davidson closed the meeting with his testimony. (He was still in town following our zone conference.) These meetings were a wonderful start to our Christmas week celebrations.
One of our favorite family traditions is having a birthday party for Jesus. Every year Todd and I, and our family, have a party on Christmas Eve. We decorate for a birthday party, complete with birthday hats, balloons, and party whistles. We have a birthday cake and we sing happy birthday to Jesus! We learn about the nativity story and we give Jesus a birthday gift. (Something we are going to do better at in the coming year.) We love this tradition. This year we had our birthday party for Jesus at our institute class on Monday night. We invited the missionaries to join us and we had a few students who were in still in town as well. Together we celebrated Jesus’s birthday. Below L-R: Daniel, Elder Benzley, Elder Geertsen, Elder Monzon, Elder Moyer, Vicky, Keifer, Prince, Elder Jensen, Elder Chynoweth, Elder Nehren, President Richardson.
The young people had a rousing game of balloon “hot potato”. Who knew that a few balloons could be so entertaining to men between the ages of 20-30?!
Dinner was soup, salad, & homemade bread. Costco took care of the birthday cake!
After dinner Todd taught an inspired lesson about Jesus Christ, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the Bread of Life, and our Savior and Redeemer. The Spirit was there.
We marched and sang happy birthday, ate birthday cake, and then had a rousing game of Christmas charades. From these pictures, can you tell what clues they were acting out? I know one is about a mistletoe! There were also maids a milking and rocking around the Christmas tree. It was fun!
We had a busy day on Tuesday. In the morning Todd taught his class on perfection to two of the elders in Denmark, Elder Ross & Elder Christensen. They are both in our emotional resilience class and they were unavailable when Todd taught the mission wide class. So they asked for an individual lesson! It was fun to work with them.
We also had another caroling activity with our elders. We loaded up the cars with cookies and missionaries and drove over the mountain to visit several of the members in the Selfoss branch. The weather was awful — very windy and rainy. But we made it safely everywhere we needed to go. The visits were unexpected and the members and friends we saw were so surprised and happy to have carolers on their doorstep! Several of them shared Christmas cookies and we, of course, left them with a plate of chocolate crinkles. We made ten stops sharing Christmas joy in the wind and the rain. Elder Geertsen & Elder Chynoweth were in our car for the evening. It was fun to spend some time with the two of them, they are good missionaries.
December 23rd is called Þorláksmessa. This is a holiday honoring a 12th century priest named Þorlákur Þórhallsson. Part of the celebration on this day is to “eat Skata (an ammonia smelling putrefied skate fish) . . . with boiled or mashed potatoes”. (You can read more about that here.) I will admit I am not brave enough to try the skata! But, we did smell it at one of the houses we caroled at! And, Elder Nehren & Elder Jensen went downtown to a restaurant that serves it so they could give it a try. Before going caroling they both had to shower, wash their hair, and change their clothes in an effort to get rid of the smell!
Another tradition on December 23rd is to finish up your Christmas shopping by the end of the day. Many of the stores stay open until ten or eleven at night to accommodate shoppers. After caroling Todd and I put on our rain gear and heavy coats and went downtown to enjoy the late shopping festivities. It was very wet and windy and we wondered if there would be many people downtown. It wasn’t as crowded as we expected, but there were still plenty of people out in the weather enjoying the shops. We didn’t buy anything but we enjoyed being out in the fun and seeing all of the Christmas lights and decorations.
Hallgrimskirkja was lit beautifully and there was not a snowflake to be seen!
The weather this Christmas was unusual. It was warm, wet, and windy! The rain blows sideways and the country has been under a yellow & orange alerts for most of the week. Everyone keeps saying it’s an “orange Christmas”! No white Christmas for us this year. The picture below on the left shows the winds that blew across Iceland this week. And the picture on the right is the alert status for Christmas Eve & Christmas day.
We had a lovely Christmas day and we hope you did too. In all of our celebrating we did not forget to honor, love, and remember our great Savior, Jesus Christ. I love Christmas and I love the gift of our Savior. While Christmas has looked different for us these last two years, some things have not changed. Christmas is still about that baby in the manger all of those years ago. Christmas is still about the gift of the atonement, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. And, Christmas is a sweet time for reflection on the absolute miracle of the plan of salvation and all that is offered to us through the gospel of Jesus Christ.
“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Luke 2:11-14
We enjoyed the morning hours together and spent about ten whole minutes opening gifts! 🙂 We’d gotten each other a few small things and we’d each gotten ourselves a few small things! We were also pleasantly surprised at the kindness of others who gave us lovely and thoughtful gifts, including my mom, Todd’s brother and his wife, Steve & Jean, and our daughter Rachel. Some of my favorite gifts this year were very kind letters and notes that were written to us. It means so much that others would take the time to share their thoughts and feelings with us in this way.
We had Christmas brunch with the missionaries at the Mogenhan’s apartment. There are seven elders in the city who all joined us. We ate delicious food, shared a hilarious white elephant gift exchange, and had other gifts and surprises. These are such terrific boys and it was fun to spend time with them and Wes & Karen.
The rules for the white elephant exchange were that each missionary should bring a gift that they found in their apartment — something they did not need — and it had to be wrapped before coming to the party. Although, some of the boys went out of bounds and bought a things from the thrift store! Elder Benzley found a large plastic leg that he brought to share! In the game it was stolen a couple of times until Sister Mogenhan finally got it in the end! (That’s probably the best place for it to end up! I’m not sure how it would look to have this leg in one of the elder’s apartments!)
We spent the evening visiting with our family and enjoying the holiday with them. We are grateful for video chats! And we are grateful for Christmas. We hope you also had a very Merry Christmas.
Below is a Christmas zoom chat with my mom & siblings. Let’s introduce everyone: Top row: Brother – Paul Peterson, Sister – Jenny Hansen, Mom – Noreen Peterson. Middle row: Me!, Brother – Rich Peterson, Brother – Scott Peterson. Bottom row: Sister – Shelley Heiner. It’s pretty great to be in this exclusive club! I’m sure my dad was watching the call from heaven wishing he could pop in and say hello.
We had a quiet end to the week. Todd got me outside for a drive and short walk because I was going stir crazy!
We played card games, watched movies, and got caught up on some administrative work and did the grocery shopping. We had a fun end of week dinner with Wes & Karen, enjoying good food and a recap of how everyone’s Christmas celebrations had gone.
It’s hard to believe that in just a few days 2025 will be finished! We hope you have had a wonderful Christmas week and an interesting and satisfying year. As President Nelson taught, “The joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives. When the focus of our lives is on God’s plan of salvation . . . and Jesus Christ and His gospel, we can feel joy regardless of what is happening—or not happening—in our lives. Joy comes from and because of Him. He is the source of all joy.” At the close of Christmas week we carry the joy of the life and mission of our Savior Jesus Christ with us to close out the year. We hope you will carry this joy with you too, “regardless of what is happening” in your life.
God is great! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you, our friends and family! Thank you for your love, support, and prayers. We will see you right back here next week which will be next year! Gleðileg Jól!
Check out Todd’s social media pages for more pictures and videos. You can find him here:
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