Valley families welcome Marines into their homes for Thanksgiving

The holidays can be hard when you’re away from your family.

No one knows that feeling better than our service members.

Spending the holidays away from home is made a little bit easier with the help of the Adopt a Marine program.

Families gathered at Toscana Country Club for the ninth year, eagerly awaiting a special addition to their Thanksgiving holiday.

As the buses rolled in, Marines stepped out and into the homes of host families.

“We’ve grown from eight Marines being hosted in the first year to 375 in the valley, with 10 clubs participating and over 175 host families,” said founders Walt and Judy Van Benthuysen.

The Van Benthuysens started the Adopt a Marine program as a way to fill the void for Marines missing home on the holidays.

“They’re very young, these recruits, some of them are 18, 19, 20 years old. Some, this is their first time they’ve ever been away from home on a holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas and I think when they come they don’t know what to expect,” Judy Van Benthuysen said.

That’s the case for Private 1st Class Bennett Baldwin.

“For me this is my first Thanksgiving that I’ve been without my family. So it’s good to have people like Walt allowing us to come into their homes and enjoy Thanksgiving with them. It means a lot especially to me knowing that even when we’re so far away from home people still do care about us,” Baldwin said.

For the Van Benthuysens, it is not just about the meal, but spending quality time together, like taking family photos with their new extended family.

“It feels a lot like home. How my home worked, we’d always gather around the table and have Thanksgiving dinner and if a game was on we’d watch it. This does feel like home just a lot bigger home than what I’m used to,” Baldwin said.

“We have so much to be thankful for and sometimes we thank God for giving us this and that for our freedoms. But we need to thank the people that make it free for us,” Walt Van Benthuysen said.