Mrs.Clause Affair~ Helping military wives of deployed soldiers

In a follow up to this post about the power of touch, I thought I would share some awesome videos of returning military. Since I have a few friends who live in Ramstien Military base, I get to visit them for long weekends and soak up all the American goodness. Visiting church there always means learning of touching stories about families who serve in the military and especially their stories of surviving deployments. Surviving deployments  is especially difficult during the Holidays! Last year my girlfriend Annie Valentine wrote a post about the Mrs. Clause affair here, and yesterday there is another one that explains how you can help. You must read it! This year she is hoping to get YOU involved read about it here!

Relief Society’s around the country, Service Clubs, PTA’s, and ANYONE can help.

Here it is in a nutshell:

“We call it The Mrs. Claus Affair and it’s geared toward making sure the wives of deployed service members have something to open on Christmas morning.

See, it’s not that these women are too poor to buy a gift or that their husbands aren’t thinking of them, it’s that our service men and women who deploy usually work insane hours and their shopping opportunities are sadly limited. I have one girlfriend with five kids who took her kids to the store right before Christmas, showed them what to buy her then tried not to watch as they put it in the cart. It was a very sad Christmas for her. Add to that the fact that most of us here in Germany are an ocean away from family and you get a really tough Christmas season for some of these sweet moms. They are so good about care packages for others, but come Christmas morning these amazing women routinely find themselves empty-handed next to the Christmas tree.”

The Mrs. Clause affair will hook you up with a name and address of a wife left at home to survive her husbands deployment. It’s pretty simple- you

  1. email themrsclausaffair@gmail.com and get a name and APO address. The APO address for those of you who don’t know is a military address for people who don’t live in America- in this case all the addresses will be for service personnel in Ramstien AFB Germany. It does not cost anything more to ship here than other places in US. If you are reading from somewhere in Europe or elsewhere in the world- You can still ship to an APO address!
  2. You shop (we reccomend $50-75 ~if that’s more than you want to commit- get a girlfriend or 2 involved and share the cost!) and wrap the gift. A tag should read something like “place under tree and don’t open until Christmas morning”. It would be cool if you included a little note expressing gratitude for her willingness to let her husband serve, etc. Make sure to include the note from the Mrs. Clause Affair (you will receive it in email when you get the name).
  3. Ship the gift to the APO address and include the note that explains everything (this will be provided with the address)- DONE! Priority ship by the end of November no matter what the post office tells you!
  4. And finally send this link to anyone who might be interested-or post on FB! Lets help these families!

That’s it- just get a name, shop and ship. Easy to do and it might take 15 minutes online!

And in case you needed a little something to pull at your heartstrings:

 

Finally I couldn’t embed this one but it really is worth clicking this link and checking it out! Sometimes nothing is better than a HUG… except when you cant get one- in which case a wrapped gift under the tree will have to due!

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