HOLLIS — Shortly after he was deployed overseas during Operation Desert Storm, it wasn’t uncommon for U.S. Army veteran Chris Lussier to find himself surrounded by oil fires under a blackened sky — and longing for the sights and sounds back home in Greater Nashua.
Soldiers like Lussier occasionally received greeting cards and notes of encouragement and gratitude, often from folks they never met but who wanted to do what they could to cheer up troops as they fought a sweltering war a half a world away.
One day two cards found their way to Lussier. One was from a woman who wrote, simply, “thank you,” and signed her first name and last initial.
Such brief notes were certainly appreciated, Lussier said, but like so many of his fellow troops, “I needed a visual to remind me of home.”
“Then he opens the other one ... it was from a boy named Jeremy,” said Dr. Laura Landerman-Garber, a therapist and longtime Hollis resident who in 2018 founded the nonprofit “Holiday Cards 4 Our Military — New Hampshire Challenge,” which began as a modest family project some 20 years ago.
“Jeremy” didn’t write a long note in the card, Landerman-Garber said, and although he happened to live in Bowling Green, Kentucky, what he did write transported Lussier back home, at least for a little while.
“Hi, I’m Jeremy ... I like to go fishin’ down at the crick with my dog, BJ. I have a little sister, she’s wonderful ... maybe a little annoying ... .”
“Immediately, he could picture home,” Landerman-Garber said, referring to Lussier. “He’s not from Kentucky but he was able to relate to where he grew up,” she added.
Lussier agreed. “Cards were a big thing for us over there,” he said.
Landerman-Garber said the huge response of late has more than filled the need for this holiday season, but she urged potential participants to check her website — militaryholidaycardchallenge.com — for announcements about smaller challenges coming up in 2024.
Twenty years ago, Landerman-Garber and her husband, Benjamin, had no idea the holiday card project they began as a way to instill the importance of gratitude and community service in their young daughters would balloon into a sweeping, international endeavor.
“We wrote and sent about 5,000 cards in the first 14 years,” she said, but once she founded the nonprofit and began widening her scope of contacts, another kind of challenge — a logistical one — presented itself.
“The house is bursting at the seams,” she said while leading a visitor through a path between stacks of boxes teeming with an estimated 40,000 signed holiday cards.
But relief is on the way, in the form of a roughly 12-foot by 10-foot accessory building christened “Card Central.”
It’s a gift from the men and women at Hollis Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 11373, Landerman-Garber said, adding she’ll never forget the day post representatives told her, “we have a gift for you.”
So grateful for what she and her proofreaders and other volunteers are doing for military personnel, the VFW membership gifted her the shed that would become Card Central.
“I, of course, was in tears,” Landerman-Garber said, recalling the surprise.
Veteran Aaron Crandlemere, who owns Crandlemere Carpentry in Brookline, is heading up the project, assisted at different times by other VFW members.
“Now I can work in here, people can come in,” Landerman-Garber said, adding that although “it is stationed here, it’s a gift for everybody.”
It was while Landerman-Garber was showing a visitor several of the more elaborate cards that one of her favorite ones came to mind. She said one of the proofreaders brought it to her attention awhile back, and it’s provoked more than a few tears since.
Submitted about six years ago, it was from a then 8-year-old girl who lived in Hollis at the time.
