In-Country Christmas

As your

Serve our Country

at Christmas -

A heartfelt thanks to you

as Christmastime draws near,

you're far away from home

at this special time of year.

May the New Year bring us hope

for peace in coming days,

May next Christmas find you

at home for the holidays.

I looked for a very long time for the perfect sentiment for the cards that my card group sends to soldiers.  It didn't even have to be a stamp - we could write it or print it.  So when I stumbled on this stamp and the coordinating outside stamp by DRS Designs, I was absolutely thrilled.  It says EXACTLY what should be said at this time of year.  Let's hope for peace and that each soldier will be home next year.

I won't be sending this card this year - it's a little late to get there, but one of the comments that I got on my series on Church Card Ministries made me realize that I had totally glossed over an important part of making cards for the church - taking care of our own members.  The commenter gave some great advice from her own church card group and talked about making sure that all of those that were hospitalized, or those serving our country, or those that had special needs of other kinds, knew that they were cared for by sending them cards. 

Our church card group does do "special request" cards and we have done such things as working with confirmation age kids to create Christmas cards for soldiers or made cards for Thanksgiving baskets going out to our shut-ins.  But the comment made me realize that we wait to be asked. We weren't asked for cards for soldiers this year, so we didn't make them.  I'm resolving right now to be more proactive.  We are the ones that love making and sending cards - we are going to make sure that we show others how much we care!

(We HAVE recently been asked to work with our pre-teens to make Valentines for soldiers.  If anybody has a great idea for how to say "I Love You"(?!) to a soldier, let me know!)

• Stamps: DRS Designs
• Inks: Stampin' Up Always Artichoke
• Paper: Stampin' Up Always Artichoke, Cherry Cobbler, Very Vanilla, Hobby Lobby Greetings of the Season paper pad
• Accessories: Stampin' Up Cherry Cobbler seam binding and gold cord, misc star brads (FYI, I didn't have gold brads so I embossed them with gold powder), Quickutz embossing folder, EK Success corner punch
• Challenges: SplitCoast Inspiration Challenge to find inspiration in one of Don Cherry's jackets (I picked a fairly tame one.  Of course, I left out the orca hat!).  The layout comes from Card Patterns.