Many times, when we think of ways we can donate time or money to better people’s lives, our thoughts turn to grandiose, sweeping forms of service: Mission trips, helping build homes in a faraway place or sponsoring children in other countries.
Those are all well and good in their places, but sometimes in our efforts to serve we overlook the gifts we’ve been given and the ways we can serve in our own communities with the talents we have been blessed with.
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Take Wahmhoff Farms Nursery, for example. It’s a farm and it grows pine trees. The ways in which it might help its community may not seem apparent at first, but the farm has found a way to use its specialty to make hundreds of families’ Christmases even brighter.
Based in Gobles, Michigan, the farm joins many others in the “Trees for Troops” movement. According to WHAS-TV, over 14 years the outreach has provided 225,000 Christmas trees to military families.
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Wahmhoff Farms Nursery has served as a loading and donation base since 2006, according to MLive. This year, Wahmhoff Farms Nursery staged an area for the donation and loading of 465 trees — and it needed plenty of volunteers to pull that off.
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“465 donated Christmas trees were loaded onto two FedEx trailers today, Monday, December 2nd, 2019 by almost 100 volunteers!” it shared on Facebook. “This year’s Christmas trees are headed to Fort Knox and Fort Hood military bases. Merry Christmas you guys!”
“I am very proud of our troops and very supportive of our troops,” Dan Wahmhoff told MLive. “We want to do something to give back to that they’re doing.”
“We are just one little piece in the whole puzzle,” Betsy Wahmhoff-Perales added.
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A very necessary piece of the puzzle, though. Other puzzle pieces were just as generously donated: FedEx transports the trees for free, and people of all ages show up to help load the Christmas trees.
“This is my favorite day of the year, coming out and supporting the troops,” volunteer Lon Schafer told MLive. “It’s a great time and you get to see all the people out here who love to help out.”
“These people are just out of this world, great,” another volunteer — and veteran — Jim Addessi said. “You consider the amount of trees, and volunteers, this whole situation is just a wonderful thing.”
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Six other tree farms donated alongside Wahmhoff, and thanks to everyone’s efforts, 465 troops will get a real, live Christmas tree at no cost this December.
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