Community project will craft cards for soldiers

WASILLA — Whenever her son is deployed abroad with the military, Deborah Waisanen comes up with a project to keep herself busy.

Usually she puts together boxes of things for her son to distribute to children in the war zone. Sometimes it’s toys. Sometimes it’s clothes. This time, she said, it will be greeting cards. And if you have some free time between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., Feb. 5, she’d love to have help.

“We’re trying to get as many members of the community involved in this as possible,” Waisanen said.

The card making will hopefully become a monthly event. St. David’s Episcopal Church at Mile 2.2 Wasilla-Fishhook Road has offered up space for the project. Julie Grey Pollock, who is helping to organize the project, said she invites attendees to bring scissors and double-sided tape and stop by.

“Everyone is welcome,” she said.

The cards will be sent to Afghanistan and other bases with which organizers have contact. And they will be decorated with a blank spot for a message. The idea is to craft handmade cards for soldiers to use to send greetings home to their loved ones. Which means that not all of the Wasilla-made cards will wind up back in Wasilla. But that’s kind of the point. Waisanen said part of her inspiration came from looking at old letters from previous wars America has fought.

“I’ve got some of my great-great-great-uncle’s letters that were saved — handwritten letters,” Waisanen said.

Waisanen said she has made greeting cards as a hobby for some time, so making batches of them for soldiers just made sense. She said she and her sister-in-law both embark on arts and crafts projects whenever their family members deploy.

“It’s our crafty Prozac, to keep us sane while our boys are away,” she said. “I’m hoping this is his last tour and I don’t have to come up with another project for sanity’s sake.”

She said that there will be cards for major holidays like Christmas. This first session will focus on birthday and Easter cards. They’ll also make cards for things like wedding anniversaries. Her hope is soldiers will send notes to their husbands and wives, but her main focus is children.

“The majority are going to be for children so they have something from mom or dad that was hand-written,” she said. “It’s just a little bit more personal than a store-bought card.”

Children are another big piece of her inspiration for the project. She said kids don’t always let on how a long deployment affects them. She related a story she’d heard about a boy she knew asking Santa to bring his dad home.

Waisanen also shared a story from her granddaughter’s recent birthday.

“She blew out her candles and made her wish and then she said, ‘grandma, do you want to know what I wished for?’”

Waisanen said she figured her granddaughter wanted a toy or a pony. So she was surprised when she told her, “I don’t want any of the soldiers to get hurt and I don’t want Uncle Josh to get killed.”

“They’re so young and these are the things that they’re faced with,” Waisanen said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.