A few days ago Lydia and I went to Target alone. (How did that happen?) And the first place we stopped was in the Dollar Spot. Two whole shelves were 75% off! Now, we didn’t need even ONE thing on that shelf. But we decided to start shopping for Operation Christmas Child!
We filled up a bag of great stuff–sparkly belts, purses, socks, rubberband bracelets, books and more! I mean, everything was 25 cents! We spent $8 and got 32 items! How awesome is that?
When we got home we put our bag of treasures into a big shopping bag. We decided to fill up the whole bag this year. We are on the look out for great deals on gifts! Lydia was so excited to pick out all the gifts and every time she glances at that bag she is happy to remember that we’re collecting presents for kids around the world!
I want to keep a lifestyle of giving (via Operation Christmas Child, our sponsored kids, etc.) at the forefront of our lives. I think this is an easy way to keep my kids excited about giving AND we’ll be able to do more this Christmas since we will be collecting all year! (And I’m totally keeping the receipts so I can see how much we spent!)
To make this Operation Christmas Child even more exciting, I just found our my sister-in-law (who is a missionary in Mexico) got Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes this Christmas! She just put pictures up on her facebook. How incredibly fun is that? Here we are making videos and packing boxes, while my sister-in-law is recieving them! It was so awesome for my kids to see the boxes go full circle!
Have you thought about NEXT Christmas?
I’ve got my OCC stash started, too! Walmart Christmas “goody bag” clearance. 🙂
Hi Amanda!
Thank you for doing Operation Christmas Child! We live in Bosnia and we do a distribution every year through our church to Bosnian children all over the city. It was so wonderful to be able to bless my daughters friends with a Christmas box! Our church does a puppet show to share and element of the Gospel and then hands out boxes to the kids and books to the parents. It was so cool!
After the puppet show we went to a nearby caffe to open the boxes. The girls were so excited! Thanks to everyone who does OCC!
To see a picture of the kids opening their shoeboxes, you can see the post on my blog: http://irbyroad.blogspot.com/2011/01/first-2-weeks-of-january-homeschool.html
The first part is about what we are doing in homeschool but the last picture of the post is the fun one! 🙂
Awesome! Thank you so much for linking to your post! I just love when the kids here can see their boxes actually going to another child! I got to see the processing center for OCC in California and just felt this real connection b/w the kids who packed the boxes and the kids who were getting them. So cool!
a
I’ve started my boxes for next year! And I got those same trains that I see in your picture 🙂
Yay! Just happened across this post on your blog and I love it when others save year round for OCC! That’s exactly what I blog about 🙂