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Show U missionaries in Finland observe traditional holiday Editor's note The following letter from an UDS missionary, John AUe-man, AUe-man, son of Dr. and Mrs. Kay of M and of Mrs. josie AUeman Monterey, Calif., formerly of Spring-viiie typifies how these young people keep the traditional tra-ditional holidays of their native na-tive land even in far-away Finland. We believe parents of all missionaries and the missionaries themselves will enjoy reading it. The letter was submitted by John's mother. mo-ther. "We had a wonderful Thanksgiving Thanks-giving Day here (in Vaasa, Finland). There were all ten of the misisonaries from this area. Since there are women missionaries in this town, we had the dinner in the branch meeting house, so they could supervise the cooking. Of course, we elders all had to help, too. We worked really hard. Wednesday afternoon we started making dressing and pies and things. We had the turkey all ordered and I went to get it on my bike. We were all disappointed when we saw it, but it turned out all right. It weighed 15 lbs. and cost $12 in American money. It was quite skinny, not much white meat by our standards, and it wasn't cleaned very well. The entire neck was still on, and the skin was all broken in places. pla-ces. The Finns hardly ever eat turkey they are all imported from America. We worked all Wednesday afternoon on the food and then went out and made a few calls in the evening even-ing before returning to the branch house to finish the baking. bak-ing. We got home around 12:30 in the morning. We made altogether al-together nine pies and one cake of which we ate two pies before we went home as a sample sam-ple of our work. banana cream pies. Some of the I Finnish members came around and they were really amazed when they saw us preparing for the feast. They found it hard to understand what kind of Thanksgiving it was, when all one did was to eat so much. Of course we explained, as best we could what it all really means to us, but sometimes I wonder if nowadays in America it amounts to really much more than that." "Thursday morning early 8 a.m. we came to the meeting meet-ing house to put the turkey in and get everything ready. The turkey had to cook all morning. morn-ing. We finally got around to eating about 2 o'clock in the afternoon. We had everything just like home! There was cranberry cran-berry sauce, mashed potatoes, candied yams and all. (The assignments as-signments had been made for months in advance and the things that couldn't be obtained obtain-ed in Finland had been sent from the missionaries' homes in America. The canned corn didn't arrive, but it will taste just as good at Christmas. Everyone had more than enough to eat. The only thing lacking was the football game that usually us-ually comes on the TV at home while we are eating. After the dinner we talked for a while and sang songs until there was room to eat some dessert. Then we went to a movie and came back to finish the pies. We had pumpkin, apple, mincemeat and |