From Christmas Trees to Walking Canes: A Veteran’s Gift of Hope and Strength

What’s this?” Oscar Morris wondered, reaching into the water. Oscar was boating on Trout Lake, gathering cypress driftwood to turn into sculptures. Oscar, a disabled vet, donates his artwork to veteran organizations for fundraisers. But what was floating alongside his boat wasn’t driftwood—it was a sturdy oak limb. 

Back in his Eustis, Florida, workshop, Oscar turned the limb this way and that. “It wants to be a walking stick,” he decided, so he shaped the limb with his grinder, then finished the cane with carving knives and several coats of poly.

Oscar made a second cane, and this time posted a picture on Facebook. I want this cane to go to a veteran who needs it, he wrote, and it wasn’t long before he traveled to nearby Apopka to deliver the cane to the town’s former mayor, who was also a Wounded Warrior. But by then, Oscar had another 500 requests from other disabled vets.

“There are so many vets who need one, only they’re too proud to use it,” Oscar said, as a doctor showed him how to take someone’s measurements for a cane. “Maybe if the canes represented their military service…” 

Inspired, Oscar began personalizing each cane with decals of the veterans’ units and medals. 

It took him over two years to complete those first 500 canes, and his stock of wood was running low. But a few days after Christmas, he got a call from a friend who worked at Lowe’s Home Improvement. 

“We have some leftover Christmas trees,” she said, asking, “Do you think you could make canes out of them?”

“Sure,” Oscar said, and the next day a truck showed up with pines and spruces. About 200 of the trees had trunks perfect for turning into canes. 

Kathryn Wilgus served as a surgical nurse in Afghanistan, treating the most severely injured soldiers. After discharge, she required two shoulder and several hip surgeries herself. When her last operation left her needing a cane, the VA supplied one. “It was a plain stick of metal,” Kathryn remembers.

She soon met Oscar at a veterans fundraiser, and a few weeks later, Oscar presented Kathryn with Christmas tree cane number 1,000 on Facebook Live.

“It’s the summary of my military career,” Kathryn says. “I carry it as proudly as the memory of my service.”

Oscar is hard at work on cane number 1,086, and every new year he finds a batch of Christmas trees tossed over his workshop fence. “I believe that this was what God wanted me to do and I ran with it, instead of running from it,” he says. “What you give from your heart to somebody else, you get back in tenfold.”