Holidays before the goodbyes
Holiday dinners in my family tend to be a little chaotic. With kids, dogs and plenty of football games to watch, we're hardly a quiet crowd and our get-together on Saturday was no exception.
Throw in a few Halloween costume changes and a couple dozen trick-or-treaters, and our celebration was crazier than usual.
But the meal — a celebration we playfully dubbed Hallowgivingmas — basically was the same, with ham, turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, cranberries and even pumpkin pie.
Why a big holiday dinner weeks before the holiday season begins?
My 26-year-old nephew Jeremy is home on leave from the Navy. After having been stateside in southern California in recent years, he soon will leave for his new assignment in Japan. And chances are very good that none of us will get to see him for at least two years.
And we figured one more, big, crazy family get-together would be the best way to send him off.
I was happy we all got to spend a relaxing day with him and was thrilled he got to take his 5-year-old niece and 10-year-old nephew trick-or-treating around the neighborhood while he was home.
As we sat and enjoyed dinner, I thought about the 400,000-some men and women of our Armed Forces who are currently serving outside our country.
I thought about the countless moms and dads who weren't there to carve pumpkins, paint faces or sneak a candy bar from the trick-or-treat bag; the grandmas and grandpas who won't be basting turkeys, baking pies and watching football with their families on Thanksgiving Day; and the more than 5,000 service members lost in Iraq and Afghanistan whose families will celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah or New Year's without them.
I thought about people like our news editor, Paul Harth, whose son is deployed to Afghanistan, and the countless other families in the Fox Valley who wake up each morning and go to bed each night praying for the safety of a son, daughter or loved one. And I thought about how truly blessed my family has been in that my nephew has not been deployed to any combat zones in his six years in the Navy.
But this doesn't make the time away from him any easier and it doesn't mean we won't miss him come Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hence, the early celebration and the effort to give him one more taste of the holidays he often misses out on.
But not all of those 400,000 service members overseas will have the same opportunity to come home — even for an early celebration.
Which is where groups like Fox Valley Troop Support Inc. come into play by putting together care packages and letters to send to our nation's deployed soldiers.
From using their Web site to solicit $1 donations to cover the $11.95 shipping cost for each care package and encouraging residents to donate leftover Halloween candy for inclusion in the care packages, to setting up holiday giving trees and letter-writing events, the group has worked tirelessly since 2006 on behalf of our troops.
The group's graphic designer, Olivia Giachino, 23, has even put out an appeal to her "fellow Gen Y-ers" using the social networking Web site Facebook to encourage their involvement and to solicit $1 donations to fund the shipping on the care packages. (To find them on Facebook, search for Fox Valley Troop Support.)
I encourage you to take a moment to visit Fox Valley Troop Support's Web site at www.fvts.org to see what you can do to help. From donating a couple of hours to help organize care packages, to writing letters or donating a few simple items like baby wipes, peanut butter and ChapStick, you could help brighten the day of service members who are far from their family.
They can't all be home for the holidays this season, but there's no reason we can't send them some of the comforts of home.
Community news editor Julia Doyle can be reached at 847-888-7709.
