Every December, actor Gary Sinise flies more than 1,700 children and surviving parents of fallen US service members to Walt Disney World for a free five-day retreat, giving bereaved military families a rare stretch of joy weeks before Christmas.
The programme, called Snowball Express, is run by the Gary Sinise Foundation and covers airfare, hotels, transport, and most meals. Yet the trip is less a holiday than a group-healing exercise for children who share one thing.
What the Children Are Grieving
Every young guest lost a parent who served in the US military. Sinise has said those losses run the full range of combat deaths, fatal illness, and suicide, placing a rarely discussed cost of military service at the centre of the programme.
That framing matters. In 2023, 6,398 US veterans died by suicide, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, a figure the agency reported in February 2026 as its most recent full-year count. Each death leaves behind partners and children who carry the loss into every holiday season.
Snowball Express gathers those families in one place, so grieving children can meet others who understand exactly what they feel, without needing to explain it.
How a Soldier's Last Letter Started It
The programme traces back to one man. During the Iraq War, US Army Private First Class Jesse Givens was killed and left a letter urging his wife to take their children to Disneyland if he did not come home. Families first gathered in his memory in 2006.
Sinise joined the following year, bringing his Lt. Dan Band to perform for the children, and his foundation took over the effort in 2017. The event moved to Walt Disney World in Orlando in 2018, where it has run every December since.
Free Flights, Counselling, and Community
American Airlines serves as the travel sponsor, donating charter flights staffed by volunteer crews so families from military bases across the country, and some stationed overseas, can reach Florida at no cost. Private donors and corporate sponsors fund the rest of the trip.
Once there, families move between Disney rides and quieter sessions built around counselling and shared remembrance. Sinise's band still performs each year, and the schedule mixes celebration with space to grieve together rather than alone.
A Tradition That Keeps Growing
The reach has widened sharply. Since 2018, more than 23,000 children of fallen heroes alongside their surviving parents and guardians have taken part, according to the Gary Sinise Foundation and Walt Disney World.
The foundation now runs a second December event for the families of fallen first responders, extending the same model to police officers, firefighters, and paramedics killed in the line of duty.
One of the trip's defining moments is the Walk of Gratitude, when nearly 1,000 Disney volunteers, many of them veterans, line Main Street at dawn to cheer the families toward Cinderella Castle. There, children place notes to their lost parents in a ceremony designed to help them feel their loved one is still close.
For thousands of US families, it has become the one week each year when grief and joy are allowed to sit side by side, just before Christmas.
