Operation Christmas Child appeal starting
It's full steam ahead for this year's Operation Christmas Child appeal as volunteers opened a warehouse in Shrewsbury to pack up hundreds of charity shoeboxes.
Around 50 volunteers will spend the next three weeks sorting through hundreds of Christmas boxes, before they are sent out to children living in poverty in eastern Europe.
The Operation Christmas Child warehouse opened on the Centurion Business Park in Shrewsbury yesterday.
Already, volunteers have received around 500 boxes from generous Shrewsbury residents, but they are hoping for thousands more.
Rod Bacon, from the appeal, said: "Volunteers will be checking the boxes and adding gifts to them if necessary. We have around 500 hundred so far but I have got a long list of collections still to do over the next three weeks.
"We are hoping to get around 5,000 boxes to send out to Serbia."
Last year, the people of Shropshire donated more than 13,000 shoeboxes which were sent to children in Kosovo and Romania.
Operation Christmas Child is an annual event, run by Samaritans Purse, which says it has already delivered some 94 million shoeboxes of toys to needy children since it started 22 years ago.