Operation Christmas Child

Thursday 15th October 2009
Carolyn went to COGGS assembly at school this morning, today was the day Operation Christmas Child were picking up the shoeboxes that had been filled by the kids.
Our kids are always very keen to take part in things like this and we think that it is good for them to spend a bit of time and energy thinking about others, so we always donate something from each of them so that they can hand it over in person.
We think the kids might be getting a bit presumptuous in their young age, in the past they have harangued us until our ears bled so that they wouldn’t miss out on taking their donation in, this time they haven’t said a thing since the letter came home a couple of weeks ago and Carolyn hasn’t looked at the pile of letters stuck to the fridge lately, so we were not as prepared as we might have been and the kids were concerned.
So the kids had to get up early this morning so that their shoebox donation (filled shoebox that is) could be filled and fulfilled, we always have a few shoeboxes lying around for situations like this so that wasn’t a problem, the problem was going to be getting sensible NEW stuff to put in it, nothing second hand please.
The shops over here don’t open until 9am and with the best will in the world you couldn’t rely on a shop to have what you wanted, you wouldn’t leave it to the last minute to buy a ball of wool from a wool shop if it was the only one in town, cos if you did sods law says that they would have run out, would not have anything similar to wool, have ordered some from the east, but it won’t be here for six weeks’ish, but they felt the need to open the shop with no stock because they didn’t want to let their customers down.
Fortunately we found a few bits at home that we could use, the rest we got from non conformist shops that open early because somebody might want to buy something on their way into work or school, so thank you to those shops and stuff the rest of them.
It was a busy day at the Café today, we were absolutely mobbed for about three hours at lunchtime with barely a spare chair in the place, just by coincidence, two of our part time staff popped in for lunch and had to wait for a table to be vacated.
It wasn’t really coincidence that they popped in for lunch, today is pay day so they had an ulterior motive, still at least we got some of it back.