Collection Week 2014 runs from Nov. 14-21st.

Halloween is over. Christmas is coming –er, Thanksgiving is coming, and that means this must be Collection Week!

If you haven’t turned your shoebox in to your local church, now is the time to do it, because this week all the churches are bringing their vanloads of shoeboxes in to the local Collection Centers.

My boys and I volunteer at our local Operation Christmas Child Collection Center every year. They give many hours and so much fun doing it, too! Okay, so they also eat a lot of cookies and drink a lot of cocoa, but they really do love helping! 😀

All week long, churches and other groups who have done shoebox collections bring their haul into our Collection center. There, we count the shoeboxes and box them up in cartons. Fitting shoeboxes into the cartons is a lot like playing a life-size game of Tetris.

Once cartoned, they are stacked and loaded up on forklifts.

The forklifts lift them up into the semi trailers that will take them to the huge, regional Distribution Centers. From there, they go out to the world!

And rest assured, your filling a box is only the beginning. The volunteer hours that are put into this minstry each year is astounding.

The prayers that are lifted, the love that is sent along with each donation, priceless.

If this is your first time donating, here are Ten Things You Should Know About OCC Shoeboxes.  Now is the time to get your boxes turned in!