November 26, 2014, Thanksgiving Eve (and Plymouth)!

It's the night before Thanksgiving and we are safe and warm in our Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment.  We were anxiously awaiting the arrival of Melecia and Rhett and their family today to join us for Thanksgiving, but, the weather forecast kept them in Pennsylvania!  We were so sad and so were they! The weather was pretty nasty today here and there and everywhere in between so we feel like they made the right decision to not come.

It's hard to celebrate Thanksgiving far away from home without any of our family here, but we are getting a glimpse of what our missionaries go through at the holidays.  It's hard, but it's also a blessing.  We get to be with other missionaries and we get to serve other people who need our love and fellowship.  We are so grateful to have the opportunity to be on a mission.  We are grateful for our family and friends and we are grateful to our Heavenly Father and our Savior, Jesus Christ, for through them all of our blessings come!

Moore about Thanksgiving in next week's blog.  Here are the highlights of this past week!

Our mission is having record success in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.  We are "flooding" the area with the good news of the gospel message!  At our district meeting on Friday, Noah, stopped by to chat with us a bit about the upcoming "flood" of baptisms in our mission!  He gave a great little pep talk about living the mission rules and being good examples to those around us and how pleased our Heavenly Father is with our efforts.  The missionaries got a kick out of his presentation.  It was really quite effective.  Maybe Elder Moore will consider community theater when we get back home!

I just had to share this picture.  It isn't mine (I wish I could take credit), but it's the lunch Nancy and Dale provided for their zone at their pre-Thanksgiving district meetings.  Is Nancy the most clever gal around?
We think so!

Sister Roy's mom sent her one last package from home before her mission ends and it included these funny hats!  We love Sister Jones and Sister Roy and are blessed to have spent Sister Roy's last five months of her mission with her.  She has been a joy to work with!

On Friday night, Sister Jones and us went to a local community center and helped put together holiday food bags for needy families in the Cambridge area.  It was so much fun and felt so good to be serving in the community.  We missed Sister Roy who wasn't feeling well and stayed home to rest with another sister from the mission. Our mission really cares for each other and it's a blessing to be with so many wonderful young men and young women who are teaching us so much about being kind and unselfish.

On Saturday, our ward had it's annual pre-Thanksgiving feast put on solely by the Elder's Quorum!  It was very nice and unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures except this one.  This is little Aaron and he is just a couple of weeks old.  We have been so blessed to be in a ward with so many babies!  It certainly helps this grandma to not be so lonely for her own grandbabies!

As I mentioned before, this is the end of Sister Roy's mission and she is finishing Boston Strong!  She goes home next week and we will miss her!

On Sunday, we sang "At The River" by Aaron Copeland with the ward choir.  It has been so much fun singing with the choir.  It's like being in a university choir with all these young voices and we love it.  We have a wonderful, very talented choir director and we are looking forward to our Christmas performance in a couple of weeks.  As well as the choir number, Mike sang in a quartet of male voices.  They sang "Brightly Beams Our Father's Mercy."  It was so beautiful!  We are having some great music moments on our mission.

On Monday, for our p-day (preparation day), we went to the most appropriate place in the country to be on Thanksgiving week, Plymouth, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the first Thanksgiving!  We had a wonderful day, (a little rainy and windy) with a large group of other senior missionaries from our mission.  We drove down with Nancy and Dale and met up with our group for a three-hour historical tour of Plymouth.  We were fascinated with the knowledge shared with us by our tour guide, Leo.  He and his wife run this tour company/museum on their own (no other employees) and they are very enthusiastic about our country's history. 

Our tour started at this old grist mill.  This little river is spring fed and so no matter how bad a drought, the Pilgrims always had water.  The Herring spawned in this river in the Spring of each year and the Pilgrims were taught by the Indians how to use them to fertilize their crops.

Leo was very passionate about the tour.  He told a lot of funny stories and kept us very much entertained the whole time.  He taught us that their original homes had thatched roofs and that sometimes animals would get onto the roof and burrow down into the thatch.  He said that they invented the canopy bed so that when the animals fell through the roof into their house, they would fall onto the canopy and not into their beds with them!  Also, he said that sometimes cats and dogs would get up on the roof and when it would rain, it would get really slippery and that's where the saying, "It's raining cats and dogs," came from.  Like I said, he was quite the story teller!

 William Bradford was Governor and Historian of the Plymouth Colony.  The Pilgrims left England for religious freedom and moved to Holland for twelve years and then finally came to America in 1620.  There were 102 who came over on the Mayflower.  About half of them died the first winter here.  It was a harsh, new world and the ones who lived worked hard to make a new life for themselves.  We are grateful to them for their perseverance.  The Indians were friendly to them and a couple of them, Samoset and Squanto, even spoke English.

This is what is left of Plymouth Rock.  It has been broken down and pieces taken from it over the years but is now in a secure enclosure where it is protected from vandalism.

This statue represents Pilgrim mothers.  There is an amazing number of Americans who can trace their genealogy back to the original Pilgrims.  There were at least three Moores on the Mayflower.  We will have to see if they are related!

The Mayflower Historical Society

 We didn't actually go on the Mayflower or to the Plantation, but we did learn a lot about life on both.

This is the enclosure around the Plymouth Rock. They originally landed on Cape Cod, but decided not to stay there and ended up here in Plymouth instead.

Massasoit. 
According to English sources, Massasoit prevented the failure of Plymouth Colony and the almost certain starvation that the Pilgrims faced during the earliest years of the colony's establishment. Moreover, Massasoit forged critical political and personal ties with the colonial leaders John Carver, Stephen Hopkins, Edward Winslow, William Bradford, and Miles Standish – ties which grew out of a negotiated peace treaty on March 22, 1621.  (I got this off Wikipedia).  The peace treaty lasted something like 50 years--the longest peace treaty with the Indians in America's history.

We love the New England churches and cemeteries....

....and the cute houses and buildings....

 

This is an incredible monument to the founding fathers that is found in Plymouth.  It seriously looks like something you'd find in Italy.  We were impressed with how large it was, 81 feet!  It's made of granite and it represents Faith, Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty.  These were the important tenets that our country was built on.  Our guide was very religious and the tour was very much based on God's hand in forming this great country.  He helped bring the Pilgrims here and helped them to build this new land into the great nation that it is!

We should always remember that it is by and through the hand of God that we are here and that we enjoy the blessings and freedoms that we have.  I am grateful for the Pilgrims and to God for bringing them here and preserving them.  I am grateful for the Indians who helped them survive.  I am grateful for the foundation that our country has on principles that keep us grounded in our belief in God.  May this always be the case and may we all remember those who came before us and what they did for us.

What a privilege it was for us to be able to tour this great place on Thanksgiving week.  We will always treasure this adventure and memory and keep it close to our hearts.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!  We love you and we are grateful for you, our family, friends, and anyone who takes the time to read about our adventures.  We are surely blessed!