‘Tis the season at least for Operation Christmas Child.
Spokesperson Wendy Stanley says they are kicking off another Operation Christmas Child program tonight at the Port of Fellowship Baptist Church on Goderich Street, next to Home Hardware.
Stanley says the idea of the exercise to gather as many red and green coloured shoe box-type containers and fill them with things you believe a child would need or like in a country less fortunate than ours.
She says all the shoe boxes prepared in Saugeen Shores end up in the hands of children in Mexico, along with Central and South America.
Personally Stanley says she involves her two young children who do the shopping for the goods and then also include in the box a photo of themselves along with a short note.
Tonight’s kick-off meeting is open to everyone and you’ll be instructed on what to pack and what not to pack, along with collection dates and so on.
Joyce Scammell who has been running the program for several years will also show a DVD of a man from Nicaragua who many years ago, as a child, received one of these red and green shoeboxes.
Stanley says the meeting gets underway at 7 PM Sunday and will last an hour and a half.
Collection for the boxes is the week of November 16th.
The boxes are then transported to Shallow Lake where other collections are gathered for the trip to the distribution centre in Kitchener.
From there the boxes are distributed to some 230 countries around the world.