The Magic of a Shoe Box

I love the magic of opening up a shoe box. The smell of a new pair of shoes is just something else. New shoes adds a bounce in your step and can breathe life into your wardrobe and make it feel brand new. My shoe collection isn't what is used to be, and somehow my girls seem to have more shoes than me (I think because their shoes go on crazy sales for less than $5. If I could find cute shoes that cheap I would have hundreds).

But what about another type of shoe box? One filled with love and joy for a child who doesn't have much. For them it can be the highlight of their year. It can be the gesture that shows someone cares when they are feeling forgotten.

One of the goals on my thirty before thirty list was to make a really rockin' shoe box for Operation Christmas Child. My family started putting them together when I was just a kid, probably one of the first years that the program existed in Canada.  I haven't made a box every year, but pretty close. One year I even got to help at the warehouse where they go through the boxes and make sure that everything is going to go through customs.

It's bulging. I'm going to have to secure it down with a good quality elastic!

It was here that I learned some of the really cool ideas for boxes. I didn't apply all of them because the best ideas were more geared for boys and Mady was helping me and wanted to make a box for a little girl. So maybe another year. But how about these for some inspiration:

-Instead of the standard cardboard shoe box, you can use other containers of similar size. Someone packed a hard plastic toolbox. How cool is that?
-Someone deflated a soccer ball and then put in a hand pump! What a great idea! (Just make sure the pump is good enough to actually re-inflate the ball)

We filled our box with hair bows (Mady had a blast picking those out), a hair brush, a toothbrush (in Canada we can't include toothpaste so we didn't), soap, a slinky, pens, pencils and pencil crayons (and a sharpener!), a colouring book, a book of note paper, a puzzle, a jump rope, bouncy balls, and a little stuffed animal. All of this we packed into a plastic shoe box because I figured that would last longer than cardboard and I've heard that the kids keep the boxes for other uses.

All we need to do now is write our letter and get a picture printed of our family and it's good to go.

Do you fill shoe boxes? What do you include??