What shall we give to the babe in the manger?

I always love the last Sunday before Christmas. I love it because the music at church is always extra special that day - we get to sing so many of the Christmas hymns and listen to special musical numbers. And, at least for me, Christmas music brings the feeling of Christmas like nothing else can.

I saw this video yesterday, and loved it. It's a beautiful rendition of "What Shall We Give to the Babe in the Manger?" by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and it's got a great story to watch that goes along with it. It brought happiness into my heart and I hope it does to yours too.

"Easy Canvas Prints" Canvas Review

*Disclosure: I was given a free 8x10 canvas print by Easy Canvas Prints to do this review.

So, I've been thinking about canvas prints for a long time. I've seen them in friends' and family's houses, and I really like them I think they're a really cool way to display family pictures. I haven't ordered any before, though, because they tend to be expensive and there are so many companies to choose from that I haven't been sure where to start.

My sister-in-law Shelley posted about Easy Canvas Prints a while ago. I was also able to talk to Easy Canvas Prints (you can find their website at www.easycanvasprints.com) and get a canvas to review. I was very excited when I ordered it a couple weeks ago; my first canvas! The turnaround time was really great (very fast production time and shipping) and it arrived just a couple days later. Here it is:

Here's a close-up shot of the print quality:

And the sides:

I wish I had some other canvases to compare this to so that I could give you a more thorough review. I do like the canvas, for sure. It's a very cool medium and I like the way the image wraps around the sides. It's a cool display piece and doesn't need any kind of frame to stand out.

It's different from photo paper prints, though, in saturation and shading (especially noticeable around the faces when looking at it from certain angles). And I don't know if that's just how canvas prints are (the way that light reflects upon the ink on the canvas), or if that's how something about this certain company. Again, I wish I was more experienced with canvas prints so I could tell you.

My favorite photo book resource, Photo Book Girl, has started to review canvas prints as well. Here's her canvas reviews page (she hasn't reviewed many yet, but she does list many companies that do canvas prints): Canvas Print Reviews. And here's her canvas print deals page: Canvas Print Deals.

So again, if you'd like to check out Easy Canvas Prints, their website is www.easycanvasprints.com. They also have some affiliate companies that do custom printing, www.buildasign.com and www.alliedshirts.com.

Have you ever made a Canvas Print? What company did you use? Did you like them?

Shutterfly Premium Layflat Photo Book Review

This year I finally finished making our wedding album. It only took three years to put together, haha. :)

One of the reasons it took me so long to make this book is that it took me a long time to decide which photo book company to use. I knew that I wanted layflat pages, and when I first started planning this book there were only a few companies that offered that feature. (This picture is a good explanation of what layflat pages are.)

Two companies that I seriously considered were AdoramaPix and MyPublisher. I ordered different layflat photo book projects from each company to test them out. I decided against AdoramaPix because of the page constraints (you can only order very specific amounts of pages, and 76 pages was the most you could order) and the real photo paper in the books which, while very nice, wasn't as clear and sharp as I wanted. (You can read my whole AdoramaPix review here.)  I decided against MyPublisher because of the gutter in between the layflat pages and because some of the pictures in the album printed unexpectedly dark.

While I was trying to decided which company to use, Shutterfly came out with their Premium Leather photo books with layflat pages. At the same time, they upped the maximum number of pages per photo book from 100 pages to 111 pages. I had used Shutterfly many times before (you can see my big review of Shutterfly here), was very familiar with their software and print quality, and was really excited to see these new options. Once they came out with their layflat pages, it didn't take long before I decided to make my wedding album with them. So I did, and I'm very happy overall with the finished product.

Here are my thoughts on all the different aspects of the book:

Cover
I love the black leather cover with the stitching around the edges. For all of my other photobooks I have hard image covers (which I also love), but for this special album, our wedding album, it's really nice to have a classic, leather cover.

Paper
The paper used in this book is much thicker than in regular Shutterfly albums. It's double-thick; the way the book is constructed is that each page is glued back-to-back with the next page. It looks great, feels great, and has gives the book a gravitas appropriate for a wedding album.

Picture Quality
Great! Very clear and bright. Good as or better than the pictures in a normal Shutterfly book. Like with my regular Shutterfly books, I didn't have to lighten my pictures more than normal before putting them into the book. (Other companies, like MyPublisher, I would have had to make the pictures extra-bright for them to print bright enough in the book.)

Binding
Here's where I ran into problems with this book. I ordered two copies of the book - one for us and one for my parents - and both copies' bindings broke after short-term, gentle use. How the binding is constructed is that the pages are glued back to back to back to back through the whole book, and then to the covers on either end. The pages are not attached to the spine, just to each other. This probably would not be a problem in a smaller book, such as if you stuck to the basic 20-page book. But Shutterfly allows you to go up to 111 pages, and I took advantage of that fact and used the entire 111 pages. And I think that this type of construction simply cannot support the weight of 111 double-thick pages glued back to back to back. In each of the books, the binding broke when pages pulled away from each other where they were glued together. In one book, this happened to pages in the middle of the book; in the other book, it happened where the pages were attached to the cover.

To Shutterfly's credit, customer service was awesome when I contacted them about this problem. They reprinted and shipped, without charge, a new copy of each book. However, I definitely think anyone planning on making a layflat book with Shutterfly should be aware of this potential problem. The more pages you add to the book, the heavier the pages will be all together, and the more likely they'll pull away from each other and you'll run into this sort of problem.

Here are a couple more pictures of the book!

You can see how flat the pages actually lie:

 

And with the layflat pages, you can do cool, uninterrupted two page spreads. I did two in my book, one of our dessert table and one of the big group shot:

Here's right where the middle crease is. No gutter, just straight across:

Here's a picture of the spine. You can see on the bottom right where two pages are peeling apart from each other; that's the weakness I talked about above.

Here's the thickness of the 111-page premium layflat book compared to a regular 111-page book:

And compared to a regular 20-page book:

And, in case you want to see what all the different pages in the book look like and what kind of layouts I used, here's the whole book:

Click here to view this photo book larger

Because of the binding issue, if I were to make another layflat book with Shutterfly, I wouldn't go much higher than the standard 20 pages. A hundred and eleven pages, while an available option, doesn't seem like it's really able to handle the layflat format. It's just too thick and heavy and the binding on the pages pull away from each other. If Shutterfly improves this in the future and somehow makes the binding more sturdy, I might consider making another large layflat book.

But, like I said, I'm very happy overall with the book. I'm just being very careful with the new, unbroken copy that Shutterfly sent me so that its binding remains intact.

And that's what I thought of Shutterfly's premium leather layflat photo book option!

To check out more of my photo book reviews, check out these posts:

Shutterfly Photo Book Review
Shutterfly Calendar Review
York Photo Photo Book Review
MyPublisher Photo Book Review
AdoramaPix Photo Book Review
Collage.com Photo Book Review 
Photo Book Comparisons

Our Christmas Advent Calendar

For the last couple years I've really wanted to do a Christmas advent calendar every time December rolls around. I've seen lots of cute ideas on Pinterest (I especially like this book advent idea), but every year I forget to make one until it's too late. But not this year! This year I actually put one together! Last Sunday I realized it was the first day of December, and if I wanted to make an advent calendar I needed to make one that day. And I decided to go for it and just make a simple one so that we could do one this year.

I wanted our advent calendar focused on Christ, since he is the reason we celebrate Christmas and I really wanted him to be the focus of our home. And I found this awesome advent calendar that this woman put together, that's all about Christ! On the front of each day she has a picture of Christ, and on the back she has a scripture about him and an activity for the day. I used most of her scriptures (I switched a few out for some that I like even more) and a lot of her activities. Some of the activities seemed too old for Toddler, so I repeated a couple of the simple ones like "Read a Christmas Book" and "Sing Christmas Songs".

How I made our advent calendar was I made 25 squares out of scrapbook paper, wrote the scriptures and activities on the back and put a number on the front, and put those all on a corkboard that we have. On the top of the corkboard I put a picture of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus that I had from an old calendar that I kept the pictures from. And voila! Advent calendar. In the future I'll probably do a nicer, more permanent one like the woman in the link did, but this one's working just fine for this year. :)

What We Believe - a Short History of the Church

Sorry I missed last Sunday's "What We Believe"! I was powering through trying to finish the childhood photo album I had been working on. Today I'm back, and I think I'll try to write the next couple this week and schedule them to post beforehand, so that when the baby comes they'll still post on Sunday for the next couple weeks.

Last week (or two weeks ago, I guess), I talked about how we believe Jesus Christ's full and complete gospel has been restored on earth today, after many parts of it were lost and confused after his death and the death of his apostles. He called a prophet in our day, just as he has called prophets for thousands of years. That boy that he called as a prophet to restore his gospel was Joseph Smith. You can read all about how that happened in my last post. 

Today I want to share with you this video, which is the story of Joseph Smith and the restoration and establishment of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), told by members of the Church in Ghana, Singapore, Colombia and elsewhere.

I would like to add my testimony to theirs that I know The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is God's church. Its gospel is simple and beautiful. I will continue to do my best to share with you what it teaches, and why it brings such happiness and peace to our lives.

What We Believe - Joseph Smith

In the last couple weeks here on the blog I've talked about what we believe about Jesus Christ, God, God's plan for us, the gospel of Jesus Christ, and prophets.

In a nutshell, what I've said so far can be condensed into this: God lives. He is our father, and he loves us. He created a plan where we can become more like him. Jesus Christ is at the center of God's plan; he lived a perfect life and sacrificed himself for us to save us from our mistakes. We can always return to God because of this redemption, no matter what we've done. To spread this message and to reveal his plans to us, God has called prophets throughout history to teach his word.

My post on prophets covers the question: Okay, if God has called prophets throughout history, has he called them today? Why don't we hear about prophets in this modern day? Well, there actually are prophets on the earth today. I talked about them here, in the post on prophets.

So the next question is, when did this line of prophets start? In the bible, we hear about Adam and Abraham and Moses getting called, and then we can read about their successors throughout the Old Testament, and then in the New Testament there's Jesus himself, and then Peter and Paul, and then...who? What happened?

The Loss of Priesthood Authority

The Church of Jesus Christ is built on the foundation of apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:19–20; 4:11–14). These leaders have divine priesthood authority. Through revelation they direct the affairs of the Church. They maintain doctrinal purity, authorize the administration of ordinances, and call and confer upon others the priesthood authority.

After Jesus died, people persecuted the Apostles and killed many of them. When the Apostles died, the presiding priesthood authority - the authority to lead God's church and speak in his name - was taken from the earth. Consequently, there was no longer authority to confer the Holy Ghost or perform other saving ordinances. Revelation ceased, and doctrine became corrupted.

Without revelation and priesthood authority, people relied on their own wisdom to interpret the scriptures and the principles and ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ. False ideas were taught as truth, and a lot of the knowledge of the true character and nature of God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost was lost. The doctrines of faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost became distorted or forgotten. This apostasy eventually led to the emergence of many different churches, each teaching their own docrines.

After centuries of spiritual darkness, truth-seeking men and women protested against current religious practices. They recognized that many of the doctrines and ordinances of the gospel had been changed or lost. They sought for greater spiritual light, and many spoke of the need for a restoration of truth. They did not claim, however, that God had called them to be a prophet. Instead, they tried to reform teachings and practices that they believed had been changed or corrupted. Their efforts led to the organization of many Protestant churches. This Reformation resulted in an increased emphasis on religious freedom, which opened the way for the final Restoration.

A Restoration, not a Reformation, was required. Priesthood authority did not continue in an unbroken line of succession from the Apostle Peter. To reform is to change what already exists; to restore is to bring back something in its original form. Thus, restoration of priesthood authority through divine messengers was the only possible way to overcome the loss of priesthood authority.

The Savior’s Apostles foretold this universal apostasy. They also foretold that the gospel of Jesus Christ and His Church would be restored once more upon the earth.

The Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ

When the circumstances were right, Heavenly Father once again reached out to His children in love. He called a young man named Joseph Smith as a prophet. Through him the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored to the earth.

Joseph Smith lived in the United States, which was perhaps the only country to enjoy religious freedom at the time. It was at a time of great religious excitement in the eastern United States. His family members were deeply religious and constantly sought for truth. But many ministers claimed to have the true gospel. Joseph desired “to know which of all the sects was right." The Bible taught there was “one Lord, one faith, one baptism." Joseph attended different churches, but he remained confused about which church he should join. He later wrote:

“So great were the confusions and strife among the different denominations, that it was impossible for a person young as I was … to come to any certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong. … In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it?”

As Joseph sought truth among the different faiths, he turned to the Bible for guidance. He read, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (James 1:5). Because of this passage, Joseph decided to ask God what he should do. In the spring of 1820 he went to a nearby grove of trees and knelt in prayer. He described his experience:

“I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. … When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”

In this vision God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, appeared to Joseph Smith. The Savior told Joseph not to join any of the churches, for they “were all wrong” and “all their creeds were an abomination.” He stated, “They draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof." Even though many good people believed in Christ and tried to understand and teach His gospel, they did not have the fullness of truth or the priesthood authority to baptize and perform other saving ordinances. They had inherited a state of apostasy as each generation was influenced by what the previous one passed on, including changes in the doctrines and in ordinances such as baptism. As God had done with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and other prophets, He called Joseph Smith to be a prophet through whom the fullness of the gospel was restored to the earth.

After the appearance of the Father and the Son, other heavenly messengers, or angels, were sent to Joseph Smith and his associate Oliver Cowdery. John the Baptist appeared and conferred upon Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery the Aaronic Priesthood, which includes the authority to perform the ordinance of baptism. Peter, James, and John (three of Christ’s original Apostles) appeared and conferred the Melchizedek Priesthood upon Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, restoring the same authority given to Christ’s Apostles anciently. With this priesthood authority, Joseph Smith was directed to organize the Church of Jesus Christ again on the earth. Through him, Jesus Christ called twelve Apostles.

The time in which we live is referred to by Bible prophets as the last days, the latter days, or the dispensation of the fullness of times. It is the period of time just before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. It is the final dispensation. This is why the Church is named The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A living prophet directs the Church today. This prophet, the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the authorized successor to Joseph Smith. He and the present Apostles trace their authority to Jesus Christ in an unbroken chain of ordinations through Joseph Smith.

I know this is a long post, but it's an important one, and thanks for reading until the end. I want you to know that I know that this is true - that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ has been restored to earth today.

Resources you might be interested in:

• Restoration of Jesus Christ's Church, a page explaining about what happened to the church after Jesus died, why a restoration was necessary, and how the church was restored.
• Chat with the Missionaries, where you can live chat with missionaries and ask them any questions you want.

What We Believe - Living Prophets Speak Today

Good morning! I know I've already expounded on it a couple times, so I won't give you the whole explanation again, but today we're listening to living prophets speak!

You can check out General Conference here.