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SOUTH SALT LAKE — Suzanne Owen vividly remembers, on a hot and dusty Christmas Day in Afghanistan, finding hand wipes and some lotion in her stocking.
"It meant the world to me," Owen says, dropping a small tube of toothpaste into a stocking as she moves down the assembly line. "Christmas away from home is so, so hard."
Delighted with their gifts, Owen's unit put each soldier's name on their stocking and hung them in a long line in the office at their post, she recalled Friday.
"We did our best to bring as much Christmas joy as we could, and this made a huge difference," Owen said. "I know the soldiers. They're going through a hard time being away from their families. It's heartbreaking because it's the time we long most to be with our families. I know this is truly important."
Originally from Florida, Owen has lived in Sandy for nearly three years and is a member of the Utah National Guard. She was part of a volunteer effort that gathered Friday to prepare more of the same holiday care packages she received — a project dubbed Operation Christmas Stocking.
Utah-based Operation Give — which collects and delivers donated items worldwide to support service members, impoverished communities and disaster victims — has been sending Christmas stockings to service members for 12 years, with Veterans Day set aside to prepare the deliveries, according to organizer Sgt. Paul Diamond.
An estimated 200 volunteers were expected at Operation Give's South Salt Lake warehouse Friday, with the goal of preparing some of the 25,000 stockings that will be shipped in time for Christmas, a new record for the organization. As many as 5,000 of those are expected to come from a separate campaign by Brighton High School students.
Now an instructor in the Utah National Guard, Diamond, who served with Owen, said the organization was founded after a fellow soldier, Paul Holton, posted a blog during his service in Iraq about the difference it made when he gave a child a gift of a stuffed animal. Before Holton knew it, donated stuffed animals were pouring in for the soldiers to present to the children they encountered during their deployment, Diamond said.
Operation Give has expanded to include a number of service efforts beyond the armed forces, but for Diamond, who was gifted a Christmas stocking three times during his 22-year military career, the campaign holds personal meaning.
"It may be a pack of gum or a pack of M&M's, whatever, but you know that someone spent the time to put that together and get it shipped all the way to where you are just to let you know that you are thought of and cared about," Diamond said. "I want to keep that going as long as we can."
The stockings packed Friday were stuffed full of small gifts — mostly donated or sold to the organization at cost — ranging from hygiene items to treats with Utah ties, like Pepperidge Farm cookies, Sweet Candy items and Gossner milk. Each stocking also included a small American flag and a handwritten letter.
For Connie Gehring, of Cedar Hills, Friday was her first time participating in Operation Christmas Stocking. She heard about the project earlier this year after Diamond led the honor guard at the funeral for her father-in-law, a World War II veteran.
"It meant so much to us that (Diamond) made sure that my husband's father was honored in such a wonderful way that we felt we needed to pay back," said Gehring, whose own father also served in WWII. "It just seemed fitting to be on Veterans Day."
Gehring said she hopes the stockings will show the soldiers who receive them that they aren't forgotten, especially during a tumultuous political year in the United States.
"It's such a little thing for us to do, when they are doing such a big important job," she said. "When you see all the protesting and everything going on, (soldiers) must just feel abandoned when they see that, and we're here to show them that they're not. We appreciate everything they're doing, absolutely everything."
