Who needs reindeer when you have a jet?

To spend time with your family over the holidays is a privilege many take for granted. But for those overseas ready to fight for freedoms, holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah are fraught with thinking instead about mission, and maybe even survival.

Dees’ Nursery & Florist in Oceanside, however, has been able to make Christmas more accessible with yet another annual installment of its Operation Holiday Cheer.

The partnership between the nursery and shipping giant DHL has sent more than 15,000 trees to servicemembers over the years. This year, the local nursery sent hundreds of trees, decorations and handwritten letters from local schoolchildren to Djibouti, Bahrain, Iraq and Kuwait.

Operation Holiday Cheer began in 2004 when the mother of an Iraq-based soldier asked Dees’ Nursery if she could send a Christmas tree to her son. Dees’ owner Tom Di Dominica Sr., tried to explain the logistical difficulty in fulfilling such a request when Jim Adelis, manager of Ogden Security at John F. Kennedy International Airport, overheard the discussion.

Thinking of his own son stationed in Iraq at the time, Adelis used his connections at JFK — working with Cathy O’Reilly, the manager of commercial air aviation for shipping company DHL — to make Christmas a reality not just for this one soldier, but many.

It would become not just a one-time event, but one Adelis would repeat year after year, until he died of complications related to Covid-19 in 2020. Adelis was remembered during a community event at Dees’ this past week as the man who helped make Operation Holiday Cheer possible.

“For those who knew Jim, he had a knack for getting things done,” O’Reilly said. “He never let anything — or anybody — stand in the way.”

Manny Alvarez, said everyone who met his uncle liked him.

“If you had the privilege of meeting Uncle Jim, you would know that he was funny, serious, sometimes mysterious. But most of all, he embodied what the holiday season is all about,” Alvarez said. “It’s about others and not about ourselves. Through partnerships and relationships, we see the incredible power we have when we all work together.”

Tom Di Dominica Jr., who succeeded his father in running Dees’, said Operation Holiday Cheer is something that brings the whole community together.

“You can see some of the schools that are here,” he said. “The Chaminade hockey team is here that helped us pack up the boxes, as well as the Oceanside Patriots and the many school children that are here from the local school districts. So, this has turned into a great event. And many other good things have started because of it.”

It’s also an event that’s very important to DHL Express, according to its American chief executive Greg Hewitt.

“Of the thousands of holiday deliveries that DHL makes this time of year, this initiative is among the most rewarding and meaningful for all of us at DHL,” Hewitt said, in a release. “It is a true pleasure to donate our global shipping network to deliver Christmas trees and other holiday gifts to our brave and selfless troops.”

The supplies had a special escort from the Atlantic Avenue nursery to JFK, thanks to a police motorcade. There, the holiday decorations — trees, menorahs and the like — and letters were loaded onto a DHL 767 jet. After a quick stop, the donated items were flown nonstop to DHL Bahrain, where they are dispatched to military personnel in the region.

In addition to the trees from Dees’, other holiday gifts were donated by community organizations like the Adopt-a-Soldier Platoon, Proctor-Hopson Post 1896 Veterans of Foreign Wars, John McLaughlin VFW Post 8540, and other VFW chapters.

“Remember what Abraham Lincoln said,” Nassau County Police Department commissioner Patrick Ryder told children at the event as a parting message. “‘A country that does not honor its heroes will not endure.’

“Because of you all here today, I know our freedoms that we enjoy today we will enjoy in the future because of all of what you do to remember our heroes.”