For the last few years our family has enjoyed packing shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child. It is a ministry of Samaritan's Purse and is a fun project for the whole family. The concept is simple: pack a shoe box with toys, candy, toiletries, school supplies and $7 to cover shipping. Samaritan's Purse delivers the boxes to children all over the world, along with the Gospel of Jesus in the language of the kids who are receiving the boxes. We usually pack one box per child, but this year we were excited to be able to pack 31 boxes without spending a ton of money!
Many items came from Dollar Tree. I try to buy multi-packs of items that can be split between several boxes.
I also stocked up on school supplies when they were on sale and got a bunch of cups, water bottles and utensils 70-90% off at Dollar General.
I saw a simple sewing kit on Pinterest and made these for around $.20 each. I bought buttons, thread, safety pins and needles and split them up into small ziplock bags. I put the needles through a small square of felt. Next year I want to find tiny sewing scissors to include.
Dollar General also had shoes 90% off, so I got all of these for less than $1 each, including some nice tennis shoes and some cool light up sandals. I bought all they had and hit up the other Dollar General in our area as well. I wanted to include shoes in every box and had already purchased some flip flops for $1 at Dollar Tree, and was so excited to find these!
We found some no-sew hat and scarf kits that I picked up a while back at Jo-Ann's Fabric on clearance and we had never used. Brayden and Brinley were so excited to make these for their boxes! We could easily re-create these for next year.
The kids enjoyed sorting and bagging candy, and then we included some of their leftover Halloween candy, too.
Our Sunday School class was having a packing party, but I knew it wasn't reasonable to think I could pack boxes with three kids running around (and turns out Kenny got called into work and couldn't make it to the party), so we pre-packed ours. We used some of the green and red OCC boxes, some plastic shoe boxes and some regular shoe boxes that we wrapped. For this picture, we didn't have all of our boxes yet, so we were improvising with some other sized boxes and bags.
We ended up with 26 boxes, which I thought was significant because I want to run a marathon at some point, and am planning on a half marathon in June. But then we received some extra money and decided to pack five more boxes, bringing our total to 31. Another significant number for me because I am a consultant for Thirty-One Gifts. The name comes from Proverbs 31, which talks about the virtuous woman.
I made this cake for dessert.
We had lots of little helpers- around 50 people in all!
Our goal was 100 boxes and we hit 102!
Who will tell these girls, living in such poverty, that they're beautiful? Who will tell them they are precious, unique, irreplaceable? Who will tell them they matter....that God knows their name and the number of hairs on their darling little heads? YOU WILL. You will tell them with hairbows and pencils and strawberry candies. You will tell them with notebook paper and silly bandz and a a toothbrush and socks. With a little box of gifts that says "I see you. Jesus sees you too, and he calls you beautiful."
National collection week starts now! You can return boxes to participating churches, Chick-Fil-A restaurants and LifeWay Christian stores. Click here for details.
