Franklin families are already thinking about service members who will spend the holidays away from home, and one retired resident has turned that concern into a years-long mission that has produced tens of thousands of handmade cards. Karen Van Der Molen leads the effort, which recently brought children and adults together at the local library to pick out and personalize cards meant for troops stationed far from their loved ones.
At the Franklin Public Library, children and adults selected Christmas cards to send to members of the military, according to TMJ4 News. The cards carried messages of thanks and reminders that service members are not forgotten. Van Der Molen, described by the station as a retired Franklin resident, is the one who set the mission in motion after leaving the workforce.
“When I retired, I realized that I needed something to do with myself, something with a purpose,” Van Der Molen said, according to the same report. That search for purpose turned into a steady habit of making cards, and she estimates she has sent more than 40,000 cards over the years.
Opening the Project to the Whole Community
What started as a personal project has grown into something bigger. Van Der Molen partnered with the Franklin Public Library, opening the project to more children, families and community members, the station's report notes. That partnership is how a nine-year-old named Luella ended up at a table picking out a card to send overseas.
Luella decorated her card with a gingerbread family to remind the soldiers of the people waiting for them at home, and inside she wrote a simple note: “Thank you for your service.” Volunteer Danielle Kenney also wrote a message that recognized both service members and the families who support them, acknowledging that the sacrifices extend beyond the person in uniform to everyone waiting back home.
How the Cards Reach Troops Overseas
Cards for Soldiers is a continuous project that runs throughout the year rather than a single holiday push, according to the American Legion Auxiliary. More than 8,000 card makers participate across the United States and in a handful of other countries, and each shipment typically includes 60 to 100 boxes holding about 6,500 cards, costing between $200 and $1,000 to send each time. The project works with USOs, the Red Cross and other groups to get those boxes to locations worldwide, and most of the handmade cards are intended for military members to pass along to their own loved ones, while some are written directly for the troops themselves.
Cards for Soldiers traces back to 2005, when Michigan American Legion Auxiliary Unit 106 member and veteran Charly Lindquist-Mathews started the project to support her husband while he was deployed, per the Auxiliary's account. Similar efforts have taken root elsewhere in the years since. Soldiers' Angels runs a comparable year-round card-writing mission called Mission: Cards of Support, which began during the early COVID-19 pandemic and continued afterward, according to Soldiers' Angels. That program is open to anyone, not just its own volunteers, and its cards are folded into care packages shipped to deployed troops and distributed to veterans at VA hospitals across the country.
A Simple Message, Repeated Thousands of Times
For the Franklin participants, the goal was straightforward. Card makers expressed gratitude and support for service members, wanting them to know they are being thought of, appreciated and not alone. Whether it is a gingerbread family drawn by a nine-year-old or a message of thanks, each card adds to a pile that, in Van Der Molen's telling, now numbers well into the tens of thousands.
