Wearing a variety of Santa Claus hats, members of the Brookings-Harbor Redshirts descended on the U.S. Post Office Friday morning to mail 137 Christmas packages to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Sam Crowl took the prize for best headgear, sporting a festive red and white model with reindeer antlers.

But gift-giving, not fashion, was the order of the day. The Redshirts once again worked to provide some happiness for military personnel in hospitals and camps throughout the war-stained central Asian country.

The packages contained DVD players donated by the Brookings Fred Meyer store along with knitted Frisbee-type toys and other treats.

Redshirts volunteers made a human conveyor belt as they unloaded trucks filled with boxes, and handed the gifts from person to person before loading them on the post office’s wheeled carts.

Inside, members stamped each package’s six pages of documents to ready them for mailing. Redshirt Delma Olsen showed particular speed with the stamper, hustling box after box to the mailing counter.

Sam Vitale, president of Vietnam Veterans of America No. 757, with an impressively tall, pointed Santa hat, circled about and kept things going smoothly.

The care packages will arrive in two weeks, well before the Christmas deadline, thanks to the Redshirts’ early assembly of boxes.

Christmas cheer for the troops isn’t new for the local military support group. In recent years the Redshirts have shipped more than 6,000 boxes at a cost of about $80,000.