REGINA – With the Christmas season fast approaching, Charlotte Kessler sat at her kitchen table packing and unpacking different items into two small red and green shoeboxes.
Notebooks, deflated soccer balls and toothbrushes are just some of the things she is placing inside, knowing that packing these boxes for Operation Christmas Child (OCC) will impact both her family and children across the world.
“It’s a great tool for parents,” said Frank King, the news and media manager for Samaritan’s Purse, a faith-based organization, which oversees Operation Christmas Child each year. “[They] teach their kids that Christmas isn’t just about them getting gifts, it’s about knowing that there are all types of children around the world who don’t get any gifts of any kind.”
According to their website, OCC is a yearly tradition that “brings joy and hope to children in desperate situations around the world through gift-filled shoeboxes packed by Canadians.”
For 10 years, Kessler has been filling two to three boxes for Operation Christmas Child. She does this with the help from her granddaughters.
Kessler believes that filling these shoeboxes teaches her granddaughters that not every child lives the privileged lives that they do.
“They’re learning that there’s other children like them that have nothing. It impacts them in a good way and that is why I try to do it with them,” said Kessler.
In Regina last year, 3,300 boxes were packed and sent overseas, as mentioned by local OCC correspondent Christine Jensen. Since 1993, 167 million children have received shoeboxes from OCC. The boxes from Canada go to countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. As well as countries in west Africa like Senegal and Guinea Bissau.
King has witnessed the delivery of these boxes first hand and has seen how the shoeboxes impact the children.
“In many instances these shoeboxes will be the very first gifts that these children will have ever received in their lives,” said King. “So, in other words, their family situations are so impoverished that they have never received a Christmas gift.”
Kessler knows these gifts make a huge impact on the children who receive them because she has seen this in videos. “[The children] know that there’s other people out there that care about them,” said Kessler. “Even if it’s just a little shoebox full of trinkets.
When they open and see what’s in these boxes it’s like magic. It’s what we always want Christmas to be – magical.”
