Curiously, my parents just gave to me my old letters-to-the-president that my mission president returned to me when I came home. I found one wherein I wrote about Christmas and the inexplicable oddity of it, but I too wasn’t lonely or homesick or anything. So add me to that column.

Chris: you should do your mission memoir. And I remember you talking about a collection of mission memoir excerpts. Another cool idea, I think. Any chance of that happening?

I don’t remember making particular mention of missionary Christmas in my memoir. Christmas wasn’t as huge a deal in summertime Australia as in other places, and the only thing I really remember is the calls home and, one year, double-booking ourselves for Christmas dinner and making one family angry when we didn’t show up. I also remember living in one flat that became an illicit mission-wide headquarters for partying the whole week of Christmas, with missionaries traveling from all over to come watch videos and pig out at our place. We never did get back into a missionary mode until transfers cleaned up the mess a couple of months later.

You would think that a movie based on the missionary christmas experience would get made (unless one has of which I am unaware). Someone better get moving on a script . . .

I don’t have the sense that it was a particularly effective missionary tool!!

It’s such the didactic set up and yet it also says something — this missionary is approachable in a way these other religious leaders aren’t. Neither learned or fervid so different from a preacher. There’s a whole area of narrative yet to be explored on how Mormon missionaries naivete attracts/repels, works for and against them (even though missionary fiction is a bit overrepresented in Mormon literary fiction [which only goes to show how small the output really is]).

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One of my fond memories of my mission to Romania is singing Christmas carols (esp. Romanian ones) in the subway stations during the holiday season.

But, talking with my son on Christmas day, I think he does feel lonely (but probably wouldn’t admit it), despite a strong testimony and knowing that he is where he should be.

I suspect that at least some of this is personality, not the missionary’s faithfulness or understanding of his role. [I'm NOT trying to suggest that this is what you were saying Bradly. But I think some people might read that into this discussion.]

I too would love to hear more about missionary experiences at Christmas — and, for that matter, I’d love to hear from writers how their missionary experiences entered into their writing — surely someone has written about their missionary Christmas experiences.

I know Christopher Bigelow tried to sell a fictionalized version of his missionary experiences, but I can’t remember what happened to them (nor whether he wrote about Christmas time in the mission). Perhaps Christopher could give us a shout about that.

Many, many other pieces of LDS fiction have at least some missionary experiences in them. Christmas can’t be very unusual.

(I don’t have a helpful answer to that question.)