Help Spread Holiday Cheer To US Troops With The American Red Cross Holiday Mail For Heroes Program

I'm a very lucky military mom - Ryan is stationed at Fort Bliss, so I get to see him all the time.  But there are a lot of service men and women who aren't lucky enough to be close to home, and with the holidays approaching, that means a lot of our military will be spending that special time of the year alone.  Let's do something to make their holidays a little brighter, shall we?

This is Ryan, and this is a picture of him during his first deployment.  He's just like every other service member out there, except we get to have him here at Fort Bliss, not a luxury that so many other service families have.

The Red Cross provides assistance to 2 million service members and many of the 24 million veterans each year.  They also help support military families, military and veterans hospitals, and provide emergency communications between military members and their families.

This time of year, however, they also concentrate on providing some holiday cheer to troops who can't be with their families.  They gather holiday greetings from people like us, and distribute them to troops both here at home and serving overseas to offer them a little bit of home during the holidays.

The holiday greetings are collected beginning October 1 until early December, and then distributed around the globe. 

The Red Cross suggests that you get together with family or friends and hold a card writing party, but there are some guidelines to follow:

Make sure all cards are signed.

Don't address a specific military member - use a generic "Dear Service member" greeting instead.  All cards that are written to a specific military member will be discarded.

Only cards are being accepted - no letters.

There are other guidelines that need to be followed and those can be found by clicking on this link.  The address to send cards to is:

Holiday Mail For Heroes

PO Box 5456

Capitol Heights, MD  20791-5456

If you think soldiers don't care about getting a holiday card from a stranger, check out this video of the Red Cross distributing the holiday greetings to our troops: