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I got a press release from Xavier College Preparatory last week about the school’s effort to bring Christmas to soldiers whose service to their country has separated them from their families at Christmas. I since learned that other Catholic high schoolers also reached out to them.

It was all through the efforts of Bridget Alcocer from Phoenix, who started the Santa for Soldiers program four years go.  

Xavier students took a break from note-taking and test-taking earlier this semester to write 800 Christmas cards to the soldiers. Stephanie Woodward, a senior and member of the student council, organized the project as a school-wide service opportunity.

“I wanted us to reach out to soldiers to thank them, give our blessings and prayers for a safe return, and acknowledge their bravery and courage,” Woodward said. 

“The soldiers are so far removed from us and are doing such a difficult job, that some may feel they are forgotten,” she said.  “We have received gracious replies from troop leaders telling us how absolutely uplifting it was to receive such kind letters from people they had never met. They told us it calmed their nerves from the bombs in the background.”

Read some of the soldiers’ responses to previous Christmas packages and other care packages here.

Sienna Frisch, Woodward’s friend and classmate who inspired the project’s idea, provided the school with more than 800 cards needed for the letters. Some girls wanted to write more than one letter to help cheer up lonely soldiers.

An unknown Brophy student loads up more gifts for soldiers in Iraq. Stephani Stefani photo.

Woodward partnered with a friend at Brophy College Preparatory for the letters delivery. Brophy’s Teenage Republicans Club headed up a campus-wide collection of stockings stuffed with small gifts such as razors and playing cards. Xavier’s letters went in with the stockings.   

Many of the stockings are en route to a company of Marines stationed in an unsetteld part of northern Iraq, according to Samuel Ewing, a social studies teacher at Brophy. The company is led by the boyfriend of a Brophy counselor.

“The donations were collected in my classroom and it was touching to see the multitude of small offerings growing to such a large quantity,” Ewing said. “We didn’t have large individual donations –it was an accumulation of small gifts.”