Volunteers working to provide for military personnel overseas are already ramping up for the holidays
By B.C. Manion
While most people are thinking about whether they’ll barbecue chicken or ribs for Labor Day, efforts are already revving up to bring a bit of holiday cheer to the nation’s troops.
The goal is to collect 140,000 bags filled with snacks or toiletry items, said Bob Williams, of Support The Troops, Inc., a 501(c)3 charitable group based in Wesley Chapel.
This year, organizers are even more ambitious than they were last year when the effort resulted in sending 135,000 individual goody bags to 19 bases and two ships in forward deployed areas, Williams said. The bags were delivered by chaplains to service men and women on Christmas Eve, Williams said.
Karin King, founder of Treats for Troops, put the holiday drive for goody bags this way: “We’ve made our list and checked it twice.”
“If there are 5,000 guys on their ship, we want them to have 5,000 bags. If there are 2,000 guys on the base, we want them to have 2,000,” Williams said. “It’s a big morale boost.”
Williams and King are united in their efforts to recruit help from Sunday school classes, civic organizations, businesses or any other group that can help them provide a bag of goodies or toiletries for each service man or woman.
The bags can contain just about anything, King said. “Anything you go to the store for, they don’t have it either,” she said.
The snack bags can have items such as candy, gum, pretzels, chips, cracker, popcorn and cookies.
The toiletry bags can have body lotions, deodorant, sunscreen, lip balm, eye wash, body wash, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrushes, mouth wash, hand sanitizers, baby wipes, soaps and more.
The items should be packed in one-gallon Ziploc bags.
Tampons can be particularly useful to soldiers in combat, King said. If a soldier is wounded, the tampon can be inserted into a wound. Tampons come wrapped individually, in sanitary packaging. A tampon absorbs blood, expands and can be easily removed, she explained.
Either toiletry bags or snack bags are welcome, but toiletry items and snack items should not be mixed together in the same bag, King said.
The rush is on to collect the filled goody bags, she added. “We need to have these bags by Halloween,” she said, in order to have them reach the troops in time for the holidays.
While Williams and King focus on gearing up the goody bag effort, members of Lutz Patriots also are preparing to make two large shipments of care packages before the end of the year. One shipment will be sent later this month. The other will be sent in November.
Bruce Hockensmith of the Lutz Patriots, said his group is always looking for donations for the 50-pound to 60-pound care packages they send to troops about four times a year.
The group is planning a packing party at the Support The Troops warehouse on Sept. 18, he said. The other shipment will be sent in time for the holidays, Hockensmith said.
The Lutz Patriots seeks to specifically send care packages to service men and women with ties to the Land O’ Lakes and Lutz areas, Hockensmith said. He encourages people in the local community to let his group know about their friends and family in the military overseas by e-mailing the group at
Like Williams and King, his group can use assistance.
“We’re always looking for donations,” Hockensmith said, noting his grassroots group has no outside source of funding. “Our soldiers really look forward to that mail call.”
In addition to the holiday goody bags, Williams and King also are involved in year-round efforts to send care packages to troops overseas.
Williams operates a warehouse, where he collects donations from companies, organizations and individuals used to fill 69-pound boxes that are routinely sent to U.S. military units in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar and Kyrgyzstan. Hundreds of volunteers pack the boxes.
Donations pay for the $40.25 postage charge for each box, but getting those donations is the biggest challenge, Williams said. Shelves in the warehouse are full of items that could be sent immediately to help the troops, but the organization doesn’t have enough money to cover the shipping costs, he said.
King, who started out by herself just baking a few dozen cookies, now has about a dozen women helping with the cause. The cookies they make are packed into Williams’ care packages.
King’s husband, Jim King, also is involved. He runs Operation Pocket Change, an organization that collects spare change from patrons at sporting events to help cover the cost of postage for shipping the military care packages.
All of the various efforts are important, King said, but the push is on now to get those goody bags filled and packed, to ensure delivery in time for Christmas.
“It just lets them know that people care,” Williams said.
Reach B.C. Manion at .
How To Help
For more information on how you can help, please contact:
Support The Troops, Inc. at (800) 367-3591 or (813) 991-9400
Treats for Troops and Operation Pocket Change at 813-746-1517
Lutz Patriots at ">
