Off Duty, Technology - Army Times

A gift of a gift

If you can’t celebrate your anniversary this year with a romantic dinner — or even (whoops!) a last-minute bouquet — because you’re busy fighting a war halfway around the world, a company called Canvas on Demand has just the present for you.

It won’t cost you a cent, though you will have to plan ahead.

If you send Canvas on Demand a special photograph at least six week before your anniversary, the folks there will turn your snapshot into a wall-worthy 16x20 canvas. And they’ll deliver it to your honey with a message from you — for free. The company normally charges $112 for canvases that size.

Canvas on Demand co-founder Tom Lotrecchiano says neither he nor his partner has any special connection to the military; they just wanted to do something for deployed service members.

But what can a photo canvas company do for troops who might not even have a solid wall to call their own?

“We’re not going to send a canvas to someone in Iraq,” he says. They decided that “maybe the nicest thing we could do was to give them a way to tell someone they love them.”

In 2005 and 2008, they offered deployed troops the chance to send a photo canvas to their mother on Mother’s Day. More than 500 service members have signed up for “Operation Hi Mom.” This year, the company decided to expand their offer to anniversaries so the program could run all year and reach more people.

You don’t have to be married to register for “Operation Hi Honey,” Lotrecchiano says: fiancé, fiancée, boyfriend, girlfriend — all fine.

You don’t even have to be American.

During the Mother’s Day program, “We even got Canadian troops who said ‘could we do it?’ and we said ... ‘eh, sure!’”

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Submit your photo to Canvas on Demand online at www.canvasondemand.com/hihoney.