Clock ticking to ship Christmas gifts for troops in Afghanistan | Community Spirit

A warehouse in Totem Lake is buzzing with activity as donated items come in by the truck daily. Volunteers are stacking boxes of chips and jerky, and sorting through books and magazines.

While you still have over a month to get ready for Christmas, Ruth Ann Young and her team of elves only have until the end of the week.

"We're sending the Spirit of Christmas to the front lines, once again," Young says.

For the past eight years, Ruth Ann and her band of volunteers have put together care packages for troops in Iraq. The effort began after an old high school friend in the military sent her a photo.

"And the picture was their PX," she remembers. "And it was empty."

And it was Christmas.

So Young enlisted the help of her church and all her friends and set-out to change things.

"We have sent a total of 62,000 individual Christmas packages to the front lines," she says with a big smile.

A tight deadline

This year her goal is to put together 8,000 packages, but she needs some help. Because the focus of the war has shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan, Young is sending her gifts to that part of the world.

That decision puts pressure on her operation: She has to mail things much sooner. Not only did she get a late start, but she has to begin mailing the care packages a week from today.

Young gets help from people who've been with her since day one, like Jeff Leichleiter, President of Tim's Cascade Snacks.

"Personally, I'm an old military guy, and Tim, our founder, is a military person as well," Leichleiter says. "We just like to give back where we can. We know what it feels like for those guys to be overseas at the holidays."

Big boost from small gifts

As his crew unloads thousands of bags of chips from the back of a truck, Matt Gregory with the Kirkland Kiwanis is on the other side of the warehouse, sorting through all the donated books and magazines.

"They don't have anything else to read," he says as he flips through a couple of books. Gregory says it doesn't matter if the reading material is old -- the troops really value anything that temporarily takes their mind off the battle.

Former Marine Sergeant Lucas Coffey knows this for a fact. He was stationed in Iraq two years ago and remembers the day the gift packages came in on the mail truck.

"There were some exuberant expletives of excitement," he says with a laugh.

Once the packages arrived and were unloaded, Coffey says they did their best to make it a holiday just like back home.

"There are some makeshift Christmas trees that we'll set-up," he recalls. "We did our best to create our own little celebration."

It's enough to make even a Marine tear-up.

"With Marines, we kind of elect to show toughness, I guess, but everybody has emotions."

Just two years ago, he received one of Young's care packages. This year, he's back in Kirkland, helping her assemble the boxes for the troops that remain overseas.

'Thank you'

If you have a service member in your family, you dread the 4 a.m. phone call. Young received one last year and feared the worst.

"They said 'We have a long distance call coming from somewhere in Iraq,'" she recalls. "And I said 'I'm sorry, you have a wrong connection, I don't know anyone in Iraq.' And they said 'No, this is…' and he gave me his name. 'We are calling long distance to say thank you for thinking of us.'"

"There were tons of people in the background yelling, and they were opening their Christmas packages. I was speechless."

She will never forget that moment, or the cards and letters she's received from the troops. Sgt. Coffey won't soon forget either.

"Holiday time is usually when morale is the lowest," Coffey says. "So, when packages come, it definitely helps to boost morale. And it does get you in an emotional way to know that people are taking the time to do this."

Again, this year's "Operation Iraq-Afghanistan" effort is under way, and all donations must be collected by this coming Friday, November 12th.

A lot of items and cash donations are still needed. For a complete list of needs and ways to donate, see their website: http://operationiraq.org

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