Operation Christmas Child #OCCGiving

How do you teach your chil­dren about giv­ing, com­pas­sion, empa­thy, kind­ness? One way I like to do it this time of year is by par­tic­i­pat­ing in Oper­a­tion Christ­mas Child. The pro­gram was started by Samaritan’s Purse and I think it’s a great pro­gram to par­tic­i­pate in as a family–perfect for teach­ing the boys about com­pas­sion and think­ing of oth­ers! I first found out about Oper­a­tion Christ­mas Child from my MOPS group that I started with a few years ago. Since then, we’ve done a box each year. Thus far, we just com­plete one fam­ily box for a lit­tle boy sim­i­lar in age to ours. How­ever, in the future, I’m hop­ing that each boy will do their own box. Since the national col­lec­tion week is com­ing up next week (Novem­ber 12-19th), we’ve started work­ing on our box! I per­son­ally love using the shoebox-size plas­tic bins as opposed to a “real” card­board shoe­box. I think the plas­tic bins them­selves prob­a­bly have some extra value to some of the chil­dren and their fam­i­lies. My boys love col­or­ing so much, that I love includ­ing paper, col­or­ing books, and crayons in our boxes. And, we of course like to put in some fun lit­tle toys too. I usu­ally like to find some­thing soft or plush to include as most young kid­dos find them so com­fort­ing. But, there are lots of ideas on Oper­a­tion Christ­mas Child’s site to get you started! In fact, here are instruc­tions for how to pack a box:

1. Use an empty shoe box (stan­dard size, please) or a small plas­tic con­tainer. You can wrap the box (lid sep­a­rately), but wrap­ping is not required.

2. Boy or Girl? Deter­mine whether your gift will be for a boy or a girl, and the child’s age cat­e­gory: 2–4, 5–9, or 10–14. You can down­load a label online or click the Fol­low Your Box option to get a spe­cial label to learn the des­ti­na­tion of you shoe box gift.

3. Fill it up! Fill the box with a vari­ety of gifts that will bring delight to a child such as toys, school sup­plies, and hygiene items. A list of sug­gested gift items is available.

4. Donate $7
Please donate $7 or more for each shoe box you pre­pare to help cover ship­ping and other project costs. You can give online by using our Fol­low Your Box option, or you can write a check to Samaritan’s Purse (note “OCC” on memo line) and place it in an enve­lope on top of the gift items inside your box. If you or your fam­ily are prepar­ing more than one shoe box, please make one com­bined donation.

5. Drop Off. Click here to find the clos­est drop-off loca­tion dur­ing you and drop off your box dur­ing OCC’s National Col­lec­tion Week, Nov. 12–19, 2012.

The process is really so sim­ple and it’s a won­der­ful fam­ily activ­ity to start the hol­i­day sea­son off right! For more info, you can check out the Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions here.

This hol­i­day sea­son build a box with your fam­ily to teach kind­ness, com­pas­sion, and generosity.

BlogFrog will match the first 200 boxes that are built. Pledge your com­mit­ment below to build a box today on Face­book or Twitter!

This is a spon­sored con­ver­sa­tion writ­ten by me on behalf of Oper­a­tion Christ­mas Child. The opin­ions and text are all mine.