**ELKHART, Ind.

(WNDU)** - It's the sweetest day of the year, and the Salvation Army made sure to celebrate it by giving out donuts for free at All Things Snacks in Elkhart.

**Juan Pinuelas**, a player for the Elkhart County Miracle baseball team, was excited about the free donuts.

But **Ron Sherck**, director of development for the Elkhart Salvation Army, was pretty excited, too.

'National Donut Day is our way of celebrating our community, saying we are grateful and blessed to be able to serve this community,' he said.

The reason why National Donut Day is celebrated goes all the way back to **World War I** when the Salvation Army sent volunteers to France.

These men and women volunteers discovered that food rations were running low, so they found a solution.

'The idea came about to make donuts, and so they pulled all of the ingredients together and they were cooking them up and they actually needed more ways to cook them,' Sherck explained.

'So, the story goes that the helmets of the soldiers—which were made out of metal—were cleaned out, turned upside down, oil was put in, put under the fire, and then they cooked the donuts in those helmets.

'But it wasn't until **1938** that National Donut Day became an official holiday during the Great Depression when hope was needed once again.

'It seems like in our world today, there just seems to be all kinds of negativity and tension, strife, conflict, and I think that really drains hope out of people,' he said.

'And so, I think it's so vital, so important to do whatever you can to bring people hope, and hope can come in a lot of different ways.

Hope goes a long way, and I believe hope is more powerful than all of the negative things that we have around us, so I'm on the side of hope, and today's just one way we're giving out hope in the form of these round tasty things called donuts.

'