Roxanne Brown has been sending Christmas cards to Canadian soldiers across the world for 20 years. At Nicky’s Cafe on Saturday, Brown and fellow volunteers were in the process of sending thousands of letters for soldiers. Since 2006, Brown has tracked how many letters she’s sent to soldiers that are abroad. For the first decade, it was just within her family. After her father, Russ, passed away in 2017, she opened it to the public, where the number of letters sent started to compound year over year. In their first public year in 2018, they received 715 letters to be sent. “We’ve had a lot of responses in the last couple of years. The first couple of years, we didn’t get anything, and the little kids were quite disappointed,” Brown explained. “But eventually we got a Christmas card here, a postcard there. Now that we’ve started to include email addresses, there are a lot of people getting emails. Ourselves last year, we’ve had two cards and at least a half a dozen emails for just our house.” In 2019, they received 1,523 letters, followed by 2,257 in 2020, 2,914 in 2021, 2,963 in 2022, 3,791 in 2023 and over 20,000 in 2024. “Having them return an email and take time out of their schedule is really special,” she said. “To know that you’re actually being received well and what you’ve done means something, that’s important. ” In 2025, they had around 4,500 letters submitted. After the letters are submitted, they’re sent off by Canada Post through large boxes. This year, letters will be sent to Operation REASSURANCE to soldiers in Latvia who are in training, as well as Operation UNIFIER in Poland. Other letters will be sent individually to soldiers around the world, including one man in Cyprus working for Operation SNOWGOOSE.
