Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Bob and Thuy Johnston

Merry Christmas from our home to yours. Our family today is pretty widely separated, but we will spend the holidays together in Tallahassee, FL. This year we will celebrate many blessings. By God’s Abundant Grace and in answer to all our prayers, our daughter Carolyn’s recent blood tests indicate that her APML leukemia has responded well to years of chemotherapy, and she is feeling pretty good. In fact to our great surprise she and a friend will visit Vietnam for a week at the start of the new year. In Tallahassee, Michael and April have given birth to their second child. Morgan is a happy, smiling bundle of joy and is loved by her big brother Mattox. My mother Jean turns 91 years old this month, and we will join her in Panama City Beach to celebrate. Thuy and I remain in good health and stay active, and we will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary in March. Not to be upstaged by Carolyn, Thuy and I will also visit Vietnam next November for the first time since we left in 1971. All in all, this has been a wonderful year for us.

These days remind us of loved ones we see often and those we have not seen in quite a while. We have had wonderful visits from some close friends this year, and we have taken some fantastic trips ourselves. We took Amtrak from Washington DC to Manhattan to visit Carolyn last month. We loved seeing her new 45th-floor apartment in the Chelsea district overlooking the big city and really enjoyed sightseeing together. Our real surprise was her comfort level in such an active, exciting place. She now works for Broadstreet as VP for Client Experience. We have visited the Tallahassee family several times...to see those grandchildren as often as possible. What a delight!

We play golf nearly everyday in River Landing, our gated golfing community. Thuy has won two ladies tournaments here despite her claims to fear competition and to be disadvantaged by a higher handicap. I have held my own in golf too, and I’ve also stayed very active with family history projects in genealogy. The older I get the more I realize what interesting lives and experiences our forebears lived and what that meant for us in our generation. I just hope to capture the family story and associated information for the benefit of our progeny too. It is a daunting task, I must add.

Our nation remains at war and our military servicemen and women are deployed all the around the world in harm’s way. Remember their dedicated service and the many sacrifices they and their families make for us as you enjoy your own families this holiday season. We were honored to host two young Marines from Camp LeJeune over Thanksgiving, and we enjoyed every minute of their stay with us. Let us all give thanks for our many blessings including life and liberty. God bless you all. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.