My family has been a relay center (drop off site) for Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes for 6 years now.  We usually end up collecting around 500-600 shoeboxes from area churches and groups.  We then drive them to a collection center in a bigger city, and they truck them to MN for processing.  It is such a cool minestry!!  Our church has a packing party every year.  We all bring whatever items we have bought (school supplies, small toys, toothbrushes, etc) and lay them out on this big buffet table our church has.  Then some of us wrap boxes, some bag candy, and we pack the boxes.  Our largest amount was two years ago.  We packed 80 in about 1 1/2 hours.  Last year we did more like 65.  When we started this years we thought there would be less.  Well....it took longer, more like 3 hours....but we packed 106 boxes!  It was soooo exciting.  I hope the rest of our collections will be up.  If our site gets 2000 boxes dropped off, they will send a semi to get them!!  Okay, that is probably too high of expectations.  But it would be cool to get 1000. 

Check out their website at samaritanspurse.org.  There is still time to pack boxes.  The official collection week is next week!!

Carylee