Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host,

John D'Alene. It is December 22nd, 2020. And we have a fun and an important topic today.

There's been a lot of interesting and fascinating episodes on Mormon Stories in the past several

months. It's been a great year. A lot of heated stuff, but I was really, really grateful

when Anthony Miller reached out recently. I just had Anthony on my interview with Anthony about

fair Mormon and apologetics has been really well received. And I was just extra delighted when

when Anthony said, Hey, John, you know, there's a lot of people that are feeling tender things about

Christmas and, you know, feeling a sense of loss around sometimes their clear sense of the divine

or even of the role of Jesus in their life. And so Christmas pulls a lot of different emotions.

Sometimes people, especially early in their journey, don't quite know how to do Christmas. And

so Anthony said, John, why don't we, why don't we do a little episode where we bring on some

amazing humans and just talk about how to enjoy Christmas after, during and after a faith crisis.

And I just thought that was a great idea. And so that's what it's going to be about today. It's

going to be about finding joy during the Christmas season. After your Orthodox Mormon faith has been

just deconstructed. We are of livestreaming this and we're livestreaming it for at least one main

reason. I really want to hear from people who have tips and tricks and ideas about how they

enjoy Christmas. And we're going to share those in addition to having this wonderful panel.

So today we have Anthony, we have Janet Spangler, and we have Britt. And we're going to have each one

introduce themselves. So Anthony, since this was your your brainchild, why don't you go first and

then we'll have Janet Britt introduce themselves as well. All right. Thank you. So I share my Mormon

stories journey last I shared it last year in August of 2019. And it's long, but I'll just kind

of give you a summary. I was a very orthodox believer of the church. The church worked very,

...