Dozens of volunteers at a small-town Michigan farm worked together to send 600 donated Christmas trees to military families stationed in North Carolina.
The volunteers—donning hats, scarves, and gloves—gathered at Wahmhoff Farm Nursery Monday morning to load nearly 600 5-foot Christmas trees into FedEx trucks bound for North Carolina.
Volunteers packed the trees inside the trucks as part of the farm’s annual event benefiting Trees for Troops, a program which delivers fresh, farm-grown trees to military families.
“Folks like yourself coming here to volunteer your time in this kind of weather, it’s just so great,” Dan Wahmhoff, the organizer of the event, told the crowd of volunteers. “I think we all appreciate our troops.”
Wahmhoff said his farm had participated in the event since 2005, and the farm’s central location made it easy for neighboring farms to bring their donated trees to the event.
“It’s a big deal to me to be able to contribute back, to give them something positive for their Christmas time,” Wahmhoff said. “I know a lot of them are sacrificing it, away from their families or the families are by themselves.”
The trees will arrive in Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base in North Carolina where many military families are stationed, on November 29.
The Trees for Troops program, which is run by the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation, donated 17,400 Christmas trees to 70 military bases in the U.S. and 250 trees to four international military bases in 2017.