Last year I attended an event with Operation Christmas Child and was able to learn more about their mission. I absolutely fell in love with the work that they do and decided to make packing shoeboxes a part of our family’s holiday celebrations tradition.
The way it works is that you pack a shoebox full of gifts and essentials and Operation Christmas Child distributes the shoeboxes to children across the world. At our event we met Alex and his story touched my heart so deeply, if you have a few minutes today I would encourage you to watch it. One of the biggest things that stuck with me after hearing him speak was that he said that receiving that box as a child was the one thing that let him know that someone still cared about him. And that he kept that box well into adulthood, because it meant hope to him.
This year was the first time that Scarlette has understood more of what we were doing when we were going to pack our boxes and it was a tough conversation to hold with her. Because she didn’t understand, even though we work really hard in our house to make sure that she is not overly spoiled, being an only child, the baby that my infertile self never thought we would conceive and then almost lost multiple times after she was born and who is incredibly loved by her whole family. It would be so easy to spoil her rotten, y’all. (Plus, she has a mother who’s love language is gifts. I just constantly want to pick up little things for her when I am out running errands and such.)
But I also feel incredibly strongly about teaching her about our human responsibility to a wide world, because I was a sociology major and because I love God. So this year I made it her job to pick out the gifts for our box. I mean, outside of the essential items. 
And honestly, she just turned four so she had a hard time grasping the whole concept that some children don’t get presents. When she finally got it I think it made her sad. She asked me a lot of questions on the way to the store and then she exclaimed, “I hab four dollars for my birfday. Oh yeah! I can buy da little girl some presents with my monies!”
I may or may not have cried in the front seat. She is a whirlwind, my Scarlette. I spend my days trying to stay one step ahead of her and somehow ending up in a chase but she has such a sweet heart.
She has been going on and on about how she is going to use her four dollars that my grandmother sent her to buy “a giraffe with a horn.” I don’t even know what that means because when I told her that giraffes actually have two horns, she said “No Mommy, not on der head, a horn like an INSTRUMENT.” But I know it took a lot of her to give up that dream (slightly unreachable as it may have been.)
And she took her four dollars and she bought a little girl a light up toy and a dinosaur and a rhinocerous, because she felt really sure that what every little girl wants is a rhinocerous. She also picked out a baby doll that she really, really wants to keep. For the first night after we closed up the box she kept running up to me to inform me that the baby was crying and probably she should just get it out and hold it for a little bit until it felt better. And that we hadn’t given the baby to the little girl YET.
Then we wrote letters and drew pictures and tucked them in our box with all sorts of other things 
This summer when we were planning our MOPS activities for the year we decided to do Operation Christmas Child as our service project and I have been looking forward to that meeting all year. We packed 50 boxes on Friday and it was such a cool thing to be a part of with our mamas.
There are two days left in National Collection week so if you want to pack a shoebox you still have time! Here’s the information on how to pack a shoebox and where to drop them off. Or if you’re short on time, you can pack a box online!
I love doing this with Scarlette and this year we printed a tracking label off of the Operation Christmas Child site so that we can follow our box online and see where it ends up! I think that will be a really fun thing for us to do with her!
By the way, this post is not sponsored, I just really wanted to share something that has been so special in our family. 
