Joe Hollister

After more than seven years of war in Afghanistan and five-plus in Iraq, repeat deployments are very familiar to military families — and with that comes repeat holiday deployments.

Staff Photo by Dan Henry Jerri Creamer, left, sits with her 18-month-old granddaughter Adrienne Wendel, as her son Alex Wendel, 23, back left, soon-to-be daughter-in-law Ashley O'Haver, 19, middle, and daughter Sarah Creamer, 16, look on at her Signal Mountain residence Tuesday. Mrs. Creamer will be without her husband for the second time this holiday season as he is serving in Iraq with the military.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how much experience a family has being apart at Christmas because it never seems to get any easier, says Lt. Col. Joe Hollister, the Tennessee Army National Guard’s director of family programs.

“I think it just brings forward a lot of emotions. ‘Why can’t Daddy be here? Why can’t somebody else go?’” Lt. Col. Hollister said. “It’s a bit of a challenge when everybody wants to go open presents and someone’s not there.”

As a result, families left at home and troops stuck abroad develop their own methods for dealing with the feelings that surface this time of year. There is no formula to make it better, he said.

For the sake of her 4-year-old son, Jacob, Elizabeth Fisher of Tunnel Hill, Ga., is trying to stay strong through her Army reservist husband’s Christmastime deployment. Mrs. Fisher is used to being alone since Sgt. Matthew Fisher of the Chattanooga-based 591st Transportation Detachment has been gone for half of their five-year marriage.

This is the second time his unit has been gone for Christmas, and Mrs. Fisher is too distraught to celebrate.

“I’m not having Christmas at my house,” she said. “It’s just really hard. We didn’t even put up a Christmas tree because, what the tree represents, when your husband’s gone, it’s really hard. It’s hard to wake up and pretend that everything is just great for your child.”

Mrs. Fisher plans to rely on family support today and tomorrow. She and Jacob will spend the night at a relative’s house in Rocky Face so they don’t have to wake up alone.

But Jerri Creamer of Signal Mountain, Tenn., is taking a different tack. Her husband, Staff Sgt. David Creamer, is also deployed over Christmas for the second time with the 591st.

For her, it’s important to celebrate as if nothing were different. Though her children are mostly grown, she feels it is best to “keep everything the same for the kids.”

Having been on both sides of a holiday deployment, retired soldier Pat Canerdy of Flat Rock, Ala., said she also wants to keep things low-key.

Mrs. Canerdy’s husband Don is in Iraq, working for contractor KBR, so she is at home trying to do what both mom and dad usually do for the couple’s three sons.

“I never in my life put together so many toys!” she exclaimed.

At this time in 2004, Mrs. Canerdy was worrying about other things. She was deployed with the 591st.

“Any holiday, by the time you get to that day, it’s just a day,” she said. “What really bears on your mind are the days leading up to it because you’re thinking so much about it.”

The U.S. Department of Defense doesn’t organize official holiday plans for the war zone, according to Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Wright.

“We try not to interfere with operations, so it’s up to the individual commanders,” he said.

But they certainly do what they can, Mrs. Canerdy recalls.

“They decorate the mess halls and decorate cakes, and they have a lot of entertainers. They go above and beyond trying to make it special,” she said.

Chris Atkins, a marriage and family therapist in Chattanooga, counseled troops in Baghdad over the holidays last year. Although Christmas is a hard time for both deployed service members and their families at home, he said, support from the military as well as ordinary citizens bolsters spirits.

“It’s like a flood of love and support over there,” Mr. Atkins said, explaining that groups from home always remember to send care packages full of lights, decorations and other goodies.

Technology that allows parents to see children opening presents in real time can make things even better — or more painful, depending on the individual, he said.

“There’s this loneliness in your heart when you’re not able to watch your kids open their gifts in person,” Mr. Atkins said. “With MySpace and things like that, where spouses are able to put out 30, 40, 50 pictures of the kids, (that) sometimes can make it worse.”

Lt. Col. Hollister said families must figure out for themselves what works and what doesn’t. All the military can do is offer support to those who want it.

For those who want to use technology to send Christmas messages, the resource network Military OneSource provides a service similar to YouTube, called TroopTube, he said.

Back on the home front, the military also makes sure that clinical social workers are on call and that any needy service members’ families have food and presents for Christmas.

On top of that, a new program has been launched to help families laugh through otherwise painful absences with the help of cardboard cutouts of their service members. Through “Flat Daddies and Flat Mommas,” families can get foam backing put on a photograph of their loved one to make him or her portable, Lt. Col. Hollister said. Families are encouraged to take the cutouts out to dinner or even set them up by the tree on Christmas morning, he said.

“It’s just one of the lighter sides of trying to get through a tough situation,” Lt. Col. Hollister said.