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Group to send 350 Christmas stockings to troops
It may be a little early for some people to be thinking about Christmas, but not for the members of the Mothers of the Military chapter in Mountain Home.
The support group for friends and family of serving military personnel wanted to send Christmas stockings, filled with goodies, to troops in Iraq. In order to make postal deadlines to guarantee the stockings would get there, the group had to have them mailed by this Saturday.
So last Saturday they spent the day at the National Guard armory in town filling 300-350 stockings.
The armory was filled with boxes of donated items, ranging from toys to envelopes and paper, tooth brushes and toothpaste, candy, small musical instruments, handi-wipes and other sundry items that would be appreciated the troops.
In each stocking was stuffed one or more letters written by students in the Mountain Home School District wishing the troops a merry Christmas.
Originally, the group had hoped to provide 250 stockings, but the community response, ranging from stockings and items to fill them, to money to help ship them overseas, was "awesome," group member said.
The schools, people on base, local organizations such as the Marine Corps League, businesses like B-transfer which donated boxes to ship the stocking in, and private citizens, both locally and even out of state, "really came through. It was more than we expected" said Joanne Griffeath, one of the project organizers.
"We asked for inexpensive items," Shannon Scott, the other project organizer said, "but people gave us some really expensive things, like phone cards, disposable cameras, $5 decks of playing cards. Some of it was very nice stuff."
The stockings will go to three Marine units and two Idaho Army National Guard units in Iraq, all units in which a family member of someone in the MOM group is serving.
MOM members who have worked on the project included Griffeath and Scott, group founder Rita Everitt, Carylyn Landry, Dawn Soger and Judy Curran, with help from Liz Grifeath, Renee Scott, and Roo Sliger, Seth Scott and Clara Hammon.