MOUNTAIN HOME, Idaho — Students at Hacker Middle School in Mountain Home, Idaho, are sending a piece of their community to Washington, D.C., this holiday season — 600 hand-decorated wooden ornaments bound for the National Christmas Tree.
WATCH: Mountain Home students craft ornaments for National Christmas Tree
The project began with a children's book. Librarian Jennifer Graff read Campground Kids Christmas Chaos to students last year, a story about kids chosen to help find a Christmas tree headed to the nation's capital. When Graff learned Idaho would be supplying the National Christmas Tree this year, she saw an opportunity to bring that story to life.
"It goes over all of it in this book and so I thought it kind of correlates together a neat project for the book and it's fun for them. They don't get to do this stuff a lot," Graff said.
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Getting the project off the ground took months of preparation and community support. Over summer break, Graff rallied donations for lumber and art supplies. Her father hand-cut all 600 wooden ornaments, and Graff drilled a hole in each one.
"I drilled holes in every one of them. I spent a lot of my summer putting this together. If it wasn't for the community and the donors and the volunteers, I wouldn't have been able to do this," Graff said.
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Class by class, students made their way into the library to decorate their own ornament around this year's theme: Over the River and Through the Woods.
"We've had a lot of creativity. I gotta kind of push them along because we have a deadline. It's like, OK, it's really detailed, but you gotta flip it over and do the back now," Graff said. "The happiness really is amazing."
The ornaments will be displayed on the National Christmas Tree alongside 10,000 ornaments from across Idaho.
"It'll be hanging on the tree for thousands of people to walk by and see, it's neat," Graff said.
The ornaments are now finished and will make their way to Washington, D.C.
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