'Twas the Skype before Christmas...(Week 13)

The greatest gift for Christmas this year for the Watson family and Elder Nghiem was the opportunity to Skype for about an hour and 20 minutes. With the 14 hour time difference, for the Watson family it really was the Skype before Christmas as it was Christmas Eve in Arizona, and Christmas morning for Sam (Oops I mean Elder Nghiem)!

Elder Nghiem's view of our family

It's incredible really when you think back 20 years and understand that all you would have had available then is a phone call, and with the long distance you'd be lucky to talk for 15 minutes and it would have cost a lot to do that! We were able to Skype for free for about 80 minutes with no cost besides our Wi-Fi connections.


As Paige's Sunday School teacher puts it: Missionary looks good on Sam!

Elder Nghiem looked fantastic, and appears to be comfortable with where he is and what he is doing. We chatted about everything we could think of and shared our thoughts and feelings about spending the holiday together (and apart) as a family, Christmas's past, present, and future, and of course Christmas in Vietnam! Skype was fantastic, but for the rest of you that also meant Sam did not have any opportunity to type up a post for his blog. He was able to send us some Christmas photos a couple of weeks later, so we'll add some of those here in the next day or two.

Merry Christmas to all!


The 2017 White House Christmas Ornament

Elder Nghiem's grandfather was in the Secret Service, and Elder Nghiem's Uncle Todd also serves in the Secret Service. One fantastic Christmas tradition he continues is to present our family with a White House Christmas ornament every year. It has always been one of our favorite Christmas activities to kick off the season by putting up our Christmas tree, and having Sam, Kate, and Paige take turns putting on our collection of White House Christmas ornaments. This year, the new ornament is a perfect reminder of Sam, as he had earned his Eagle Scout award at the beginning of 2017. We were very pleased to see that the 2017 ornament is a Bald Eagle!


Elder Nghiem (Sam Watson) in front of his Eagle Service Project

Our new favorite Christmas tradition is Skyping with our missionary! Here are some additional photos of his Christmas in Vietnam.

Elder Nghiem's Christmas Stocking