Buon Natale: too much food
Christmas day was probably busier than we would have liked, but the food and company made it all worthwhile! The young sisters brought by some homemade cookies in the morning to say thanks for our help the night before.
After a fairly relaxed morning, in which my wife defrosted and baked the extra casserole from last Friday, we headed out to the Perego/ward Christmas dinner at our chapel. Ugo and his family have been doing this for four years now: the whole family arrives about noon to start preparing tons of food -- some purchased, some homemade. Everyone in the ward is invited, but it's particularly aimed at those who have no family nearby for the holiday.
When we arrived, my wife went to the kitchen, while I went into the clerk's office to try to understand the slow internet issues. After power cycling everything, I did some speed tests, which show about 3.5Mbps down and about 0.5Mbps up; horrible numbers, which varied a bit from test to test, but comparable to our DSL at home. I also installed the new extra router in the chapel to try to get better coverage throughout the building. It helped a little, but the slow internet connection dominates everything, not in a good way.
There were many kitchen helpers, and the spread was amazing. At first there were several kinds of appetizers, some of which Alessio helped prepare. Included were a bunch of small pieces of bread, on which you put various spreads.
Ugo welcomed everyone about 2pm, and the festivities began. Children and ladies got to start first.
After appetizers came the pasta and soup, with several different kinds to try. My favorite was the tortellini.
After the pasta came sausage, freshly grilled outside by our Elders Quorum President.
Finally came the desserts.
There was a pretty good turnout, maybe 30 people, though fewer than expected, so there were a lot of leftovers, some of which went home with the young missionaries.
After dessert, they played Uno, Yahtzee, and then Bingo.
The Peregos gave each missionary a nice gift: a sock filled with rice that you can warm in the microwave and put on your neck or back when something is sore. David made them all. We have some of these at home that we love, and there are times when they are indispensable.
Sister Manning wanted to Skype home about 5pm, so I went into the clerk's office, unplugged the WiFi unit ("LDSAccess") so nobody else could use the scant bandwidth, and then hooked up my laptop with an Ethernet cable for her to use. She was able to connect and have a call with decent quality.
Once her 40 minutes was finished, I unplugged my laptop and reconnected the WiFi. Afterward, she mentioned that all of her photos are on the internal storage of her Samsung tablet, and in Google Drive, so I offered to buy a 64GB SD card on amazon.it for her (she'll reimburse me: 25 euros) so she can have a removable copy. I'm also downloading all her photos and videos, over 10GB, at home here to put onto her USB flash drive. We Whitings are pretty hard core about having multiple backup copies of things, having once lost stuff in a fire. She was delighted.
It was about 7pm when we finally got home, stuffed to the gills! Everything was so good, but we really shouldn't have eaten so much -- easier said than done. 😋
We called some friends up in northern Italy and in Switzerland to wish them a Merry Christmas, and then we also called our kids to do likewise. Overall, a very nice day, quite different from most Christmases for us. Here is our Christmas card to you: our 3-D figures with hand-made cards from our daughter Wendy.
