Hey, Merry Christmas here from Follow Him.

This is Follow Him favorites, where John and I share a single story to go with each week's lesson.

John, it's the Christmas episode on Follow Him, and you have told me that you have a Follow Him favorite, a story.

I do, Hank, and I got it from the December 2025 Leahona Magazine.

It was really funny because I was reading it with my wife.

And the next day we met the author, it's brother Gabe Reed, who's in the Sunday School General Presidency.

And we didn't know.

I felt really cool saying, yeah, I read your thing yesterday.

This is what he said. This is quite the story. I grew up in American Samoa as one of 13 siblings.

All of us lived in a small three-bedroom home in the village of it looks like Leone. Maybe it's Leone.

Christmas was always special for our family, a time to reflect on the birth and the atonement of Jesus Christ, and a time to serve and give. One Christmas season, after working

hard and saving up, my parents bought each one of us a gift and placed them under the tree. We

were so excited. But before Christmas arrived, my older brother woke us up one morning with

devastating news. Every single present had been stolen.

Someone had broken in during the night and taken them all. From that heartbreaking experience,

Brother Reed said, a new tradition was born. Every Christmas after that, we'd sleep around the

Christmas tree to protect our gifts.

As funny and as tragic as that memory is,

it taught me more than to be cautious about Christmas gifts.

It reminded me how important it is to safeguard and prioritize our covenant relationship with Heavenly Father.

And then he said this, just as we protect our gifts or

we protected them, we need to protect and prioritize our covenant relationship. Many of us face big

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