Aragon Peace Club and Aragon’s Leadership Class first began our annual Cards for Soldiers event in December 2006. During the week-long event, we invite students and staff (and anyone else, for that matter) to make holiday cards to send to soldiers in Iraq. Although we are a Peace Club, we recognize that regardless of whether or not the war is justified, the soldiers did sign up to defend our country, and being in a war zone is really stressful. Soldiers really appreciate receiving holiday cards and other words of support from folks back home.

During the week of December 4th-8th, 2006, Peace Club and Leadership provided a table at lunch with supplies for students to make and write cards to send to soldiers, and we accumulated 90 cards, pretty good for the first year. (You can see some 2006 pictures above.) In January 2007, we received a response from one of the soldiers, who apparently worked in a medical hospital in Baghdad and said that the cards were really touching to the soldiers in the hospital.

We work with the website AnySoldier.com to send the cards out. AnySoldier.com maintains a list of soldiers who agree to be “contacts” and receive letters and goods, which they share with the soldiers that they are with. Because we are a school group, AnySoldier.com is permitting us to have full access to their database for a day in 2007 for us to send our cards. (Anyone who wants to send other goods besides cards can do so independently–more information is listed on AnySoldier.com’s website.)

We did Cards for Soldiers again during the week of November 26-30, 2007, working along with the Leadership Class and with Aragon’s Interact Club. We shattered last year’s numbers and accumulated 203 cards, which were all sent to soldiers overseas. We have since received over a dozen touching responses back from these soldiers thanking us for the cards.

While we hope that the soldiers will be home by the time the next holiday season rolls around, we will otherwise be planning to do our third event in 2008 (tentatively expected to be the week of December 1st), and hope that you will be able to participate as well to help us share the spirit of the holidays with the folks who probably need the holiday spirit the most of all.

If you have any questions about Cards for Soldiers, please contact Douglas Bell, President.