SOWW (and Seuss) At Walter Reed This Christmas!

Christmas!

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Christmas Time is also "Anniversary Time" for Serve Our Willing Warriors. Years before we became a nonprofit, we started out as a Park Valley Church group created by SOWW founders: John and Shirley Dominick.  Our mission:  Giving Christmas gifts and spending time with the Warriors + Their Families at the Walter Reed and Fort Belvoir hospitals. Years later, we still begin every December with the longstanding SOWW tradition of handing out Christmas gifts to Warrior Families, much like a pack of Santa's elves.

This year began with a bang -- but not the fun kind!  As we began loading our U-Haul with gifts, a container holding stocking stuffers fell off the truck and sent bottles flying! Does this kind of stuff happen to Santa when he loads his sleigh?

Fortunately, we brought along some little elves of our own (brothers Ben & Zander Ward) who got right to work retrieving bottles underneath the truck!

Older brother Ben is also one of our amazing fundraisers!  

For this event, he served as the SOWW representative of the 

USO's Dr. Seuss Theme for this Christmas event. 

What a multi-tasker!

Ben Ward (i.e.: The Cat in the Hat) standing by the trees filled with mistletoe at The Bull Run Warrior Retreat.

This year the Walter Reed festivities were hosted at the beautiful USO building.

It was pretty easy to spot due to the amount of elves scattered about the premises.

Team SOWW scurried to set up our tables piled full of

Vint Hill special blend coffee & mugs, warm fuzzy blankets, gift cards, SOWW Christmas ornaments, and handmade Warrior Holiday cards from local schools (plus cookies and candies). 

I don't mean to brag, but we definitely had the cutest elves onsite!

The Ward Bros. manned both ends of the tables to hand out SOWW bags to Warriors to collect their Christmas goodies.

Team SOWW in action:

Giving gifts and sharing information on 

The Bull Run Warrior Retreat.

Outside the excitement builds.

Santa is scheduled to arrive at any minute!

Once Santa arrived, the room overflowed with Warrior Families lining up to meet 

The Elf in Chief!

That Santa! (He gets around!)

Here he is -- planting a saucy smooch on one of the Gold Star Mothers (Maryland Chapter)!

Some additional Elves (non-affliated with Santa) pose with their table of Christmas toys 

collected for the children of our Warrior Families. 

The Bull Run Warrior Retreat sign-up list filled with over two pages of Warriors hoping to stay at the retreat in the future.

We also got to visit with some previous retreat guests!

Captain Reer and her personal SOWW advocate, Ben Ward.

After hours of gift-giving, we handed out the very last of our blankets, coffee packs and gift certificates.

Mission Accomplished

for the 2016 SOWW Gift-Giving at Walter Reed!

We said our farewells and headed back to Haymarket to gear up for the upcoming visit to Fort Belvoir.

Until next year . . . 

Merry Christmas to All at Walter Reed!

PS:  Many thanks to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the USO Warrior and Family Center at Bethesda and their support staff who, once again, opened their doors and allowed us to participate in this heartwarming event.

Serve Our Willing Warriors Takes Some Christmas Spirit To Walter Reed At Bethesda

  

It truly begins to feel like Christmas when SOWW visits our Willing Warriors + Families at Walter Reed at Bethesda for our Annual Willing Warrior Gift-Giving.

This year, the Warriors + Their Families lined up for hours all the way down the lengthy hall to collect their gift cards and plush sherpa blankets from SOWW and our partners Park Valley Church + Intelligent Decisions. We were joined this year by iPods For Wounded Veterans, one of our favorite nonprofits!

Santa also made an appearance and waited at the end of the line to hand out goodies like candy canes and hand-knit scarves.

(And pose for pictures.)

We feel so fortunate that Walter Reed continues to open its doors to us, year after year, for these special visits. We could not do this without the support and partnership of our community of SOWWers who are so faithful to donate for this annual event. We wish all of you could be there with us each time to see the appreciation on the faces of these Warriors, their spouses, parents, siblings and children when we take our little bit of Christmas cheer into their midst. 

We hope we these photos give you a taste of how the day felt.

Awww . . . 

One of the service dogs was looking shy, but festive, in her colorful Christmas sweater.

We came away from the weekend with 12 pages of signatures of Warrior Families who are hoping to stay at The Bull Run Warrior Retreat in the near future. It further inspired us to "press on towards the goal" and work hard to complete all the retreat house renovations as soon as possible. These families desperately need what we can soon provide -- short respite stays in a "home away from home" environment.

 SOWW VP John Dominick (below) shares both gratitude and thanks with one of our 

Willing Warriors.

By the end of the day, we had exhausted our supply of gifts, shook many hands, and said many thank yous. 

But, as always, we received far more than we gave.

To all you SOWWers out there who made this possible once again:

 Many, many thanks and many blessings to you!