Remember Our Heroes

On this Holiday weekend please take a moment out of your festivities to remember our Heroes. Happy Memorial Day!

May Mailing Update

Happy Spring everyone! I guess you could call it Spring here in New Hampshire, it was crazy warm with a bunch of 80 degree days in March, then on April Fool’s Day we got a snow storm and it was cold for most of the month. Now in the beginning of May it rained for a week straight! I for one am ready for warmth!

We had another great Round this time with 2419 cards that came in! As well as some wonderful postage donations! I have to say thank you so much to all of you for all the support again!

Round 6 is Due June 15th and is for General/All Occasion cards. These are for your normal Birthday, Thinking of You, Miss You, Thank You, Anniversary, Wedding, New Baby, New Home, Sympathy, and any other types of cards you can think of that don’t fit into the specific holiday categories. Birthday and Thank You are the ones we do not get a lot of but are needed. Think of how many birthday’s the soldiers miss and also how many care packages they get where they could use a beautiful handmade card to send!

I also wanted to share a note one of our dedicated card makers received from a Colonel in Afghanistan just recently…

Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did!

Until next time, sending you my kindest regards and thanks for everything you all do!

Pam

Oops! A Little Late!

Wow, I can’t believe I missed the March update! I apologize! I didn’t even realize it until someone sent an email and told me they hadn’t seen an update since February! I guess when you don’t get Google Reader updates on your own website that can happen!

Life got in the way for me, March was a hectic month, I took a little birthday trip out to San Diego to spend some time with one of my best girlfriends for 6 days, had a blast and I guess I have been playing catch up since! I left on March 1st and actually left my 16 year old son in charge of putting the boxes out to be picked up by the mail man. He has been helping me with the cards as his community service project for school so I figured that could be part of his duty. I made it very easy for him and 1861 cards were mailed for the March mailing!

I owe a bunch of you notes that put a note in  your box, I apologize, the deadline was right at the same time as my trip so I put them off until I got back and then the notes got put under a pile on my table and forgotten about. I am going to get to them this week!

As for the April mailing which consisted mostly of Armed Forces Day and Mother’s Day cards we sent 2002 cards! I have to say there were over 300 Armed Forces Day cards, which was pretty great! Still not enough to give one to each soldier that uses our cards but baby steps right?

Thank you to everyone who sent postage donations!

Our next mailing deadline is May 4th and is for Father’s Day and 4th of July cards.

Oh and thank you for the increase in the number of birthday cards, there were so many more this time around!

Until next time!
Pam

St. Patrick’s Day Mailing

1007 Cards this mailing. Sorry I am so late with the post. I am a little behind with things this month! If any of you sent me a note with your package I’ll be getting back to you very soon I promise! Thank you all for your support!

I had a helper this month, my son Jake is helping me out as his community service for his Sophomore project for school. He has to do 30 hours so he did a lot of sorting yesterday! He thinks its boring! How he thinks looking at such great cards can be boring is beyond me!

Our next mailing is right around the corner, Passover and Easter card are due March 1st. We could really use some birthday cards as well if anyone enjoys making those. We tend to get a lot of Thinking of You but not a lot of Birthday.

Thank you all! I appreciate everything you do!

Pam

Valentine’s Day!

Happy New Year! It’s our first mailing of 2012 and we will have 2128 cards to send! Not too shabby! Thank you to all of you who sent Valentine’s Day cards! The soldiers will have lots of “Love” themed cards to send home this year. There were so many pretty ones I had a great time looking at them! There were some general themed cards as well and I thank you for those because we definitely need those each mailing too! I didn’t have as much card making time as I would have liked this time so I need to get started really soon on my St. Patrick’s Day cards because that deadline is just around the corner!

Once again I want to thank you all for the postage donations. And on that note I would like to ask you all to please pass the word on about the fact that I am an official 501c3 Non-Profit organization. Which means donations are tax deductible! If you know anyone that has a company that does matching donations, please ask them to consider donating to Cards for Soldiers in their company match program. Thank you!

Until next time,
Pam

Last Mailing of 2011 & Year’s Totals

And it was a great one! 7100 Cards to be exact! And most of them were Christmas cards. There were 21 boxes in all and out of those only 3 were general cards. Thank you all for another very successful mailing! Thanks to all of those who also sent in postage donations with your card donations, once again, with a mailing this large it’s a huge help to me and my pocketbook!

I wanted to mention that once again I received many cards that were on dark cardstock but were not lined inside. I did not have the time to fix these cards this time around because I spent all my free time sorting cards (see number above ). Those cards went into a ‘to be fixed’ box and were not mailed this year. Cards on dark cardstock aren’t sent because you have to think about the fact that the soldiers aren’t going to have a white pen on hand and black or blue ink won’t show up so all of the dark cards need to be lined before I can send them. I have updated the card specs to make this a requirement so hopefully this will help remind you when making the cards.

Now I know that you all have heard the news about troops in Iraq coming home by the end of the year. I hope that doesn’t stop you from sending cards. I’ll tell you why, 1) most of the troops I send cards to are not in Iraq, they are in Afghanistan and 2) There are many soldiers who are reservists that are deployed all the time, even when we are not at war whom I plan on sending cards for as long as the cards keep coming in.

And now are you ready for the yearly total…

32669 cards mailed to the soldiers in 2011! Can you believe that number? Amazing! And all because of you! Thank you all for making CFS such as success!

Now, I need to work on my own Christmas cards before it’s time to start making Valentine’s Day cards!

I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season!

Pam

Happy Veteran’s Day

VETERAN'S DAY IS 11-11-11, REMEMBER WHY WE HAVE THIS DAY! THANK A SOLDIER WHO MADE IT HOME OR THE FAMILY OF ONE WHO DID NOT!!! REMEMBER TO THANK OUR CURRENT SOLDIERS AND THEIR FAMILIES FOR WHAT THEY ENDURE ALSO!!!