Christmas Letter 2020

Christmas greetings to our family and friends!  I want to write a Christmas letter without mentioning the C word, even though we all know it affected many things about our lives this year.  We still had many blessings and we still had many highlights and good times this year.

     We were blessed to host 20 students, 23 family members, 50 church folk, and 18 others as guests for meals in our home.  We even had 26 overnight guests.  Probably our governor would not have approved of every gathering, but we behaved pretty well when he was most insistent.
      We got to make a trip to South Dakota to see our oldest son and his family over the long July 4^th weekend.  This was our first time to see Mandylyn in person, when she was over 10 months old.  We had a great time with them.
      We were privileged to have a week’s vacation in northern Georgia in late July.  We were gifted a stay at a resort in the mountains.  The weather was really hot, but we still had a lot of fun together, hiked to a beautiful waterfall, were able to enjoy swimming, canoeing, paddle boating, a museum, quilt shop, and antique store.  We even had time to sit by the lake and read and relax.  We also saw 3 different sets of friends on the front end of the trip and toured a cave in Tennessee on the way home.
     Elizabeth had the opportunity to move to Bedford, Indiana to begin working for Evangelistic Faith Missions in mid-August.  She has enjoyed getting to know another group of God’s wonderful people there and is challenged daily by all the work there is to do for EFM and Shepherds Global Classroom.  We have gone there 3 times to help with various renovation projects at the office.  We are thankful that Elizabeth is content in knowing she is where God wants her to be and He is teaching her many things in her new work.
     All of our “away” kids and grandkids were with us for the August 23rd weekend to celebrate Elizabeth’s graduation with her BA and Jason’s graduation with his BA and MA from God’s Bible School and College.  We so much enjoyed having everybody together for the weekend.  The only drawback was that Jason and Karen were not with us in person for a reason I am not mentioning (see paragraph 1).  But we are very happy and proud of our graduates and we (finally) got pictures of them together when Elizabeth came home for her birthday weekend in September.

     Because of shorter work hours from mid-March to mid-August, I got time to make small quilts for the 4 youngest grandchildren who didn’t have a quilt from grandma yet.  I also made one for our Georgia friends’ new baby and a nap quilt for Elizabeth to have in her Indiana life.  Because my quilter has retired, I quilted these smaller quilts using one of our sewing machines and a walking foot.  Because my quilter offered her machine for sale, and it has long been a goal/dream of Rowen and I to have a long arm quilting machine, we plan to buy it from her on our New Year’s trip to Missouri!  We hope to learn how to quilt and save a lot of money by doing it ourselves.  Hopefully we will get experienced enough to quilt for other people too, someday.
    We had to have a new roof and a new furnace and air conditioner this year.  We are thankful to have those things done and trust that is the end of huge and expensive projects!
      We’ve always wanted to have a porch so we could have a porch swing.  This year the family got me a swing for Mother’s Day.  We have enjoyed it very much.
     We tried to have a family picture in August, because of our last one being from 2017 and we’ve gained 2 more grandchildren since then.  A couple of us were missing, but Emily photo-shopped them in.  You will be able to tell which ones’ faces are added in.  Hint:  it looks like they are wearing grass colored clothing.  But that is all of us until next year when we will be getting another grandchild.  
     We are thankful for all the blessings this year held, but most of all we are thankful for an unchanging God who is in control and is still the Answer that every one of us need.  We are so glad we are committed to His purpose in our lives.  We are so glad Jesus came to be our Savior, our Emmanuel, “God with us.”  We celebrate that! 

Love to all,
                   Janet and Rowen Albertson and family

PS I am so sorry I have been too busy to keep up my blog this year.  Please click on Emily's picture  on the side bar and look at hers.  She has been so much better keeping her blog updated.