Nearly four thousand shoeboxes were collected in Steinbach and area this year for Operation Christmas Child.

Debbie de Klein is Area Coordinator. She says Blumenort and Grunthal were the two collection centres this year. De Klein says four thousand shoeboxes is right on par with recent years.

Gerald Plett helps wheel out shoeboxes (Photo credit: Debbie de Klein)Those shoeboxes will be loaded on to a truck and leave for Calgary on Thursday. De Klein says even though the deadline has passed, anyone still wanting to drop off a shoebox should get it to her as soon as possible.

De Klein says the shoeboxes are delivered to the processing centre in Calgary. Processing each one could take until Christmas and after that, they are delivered to children in developing countries. This year they will end up in Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Senegal Sierra Leone, Ukraine and Chile.

"Our family, my husband and our three children are going to be going to Costa Rica just after Christmas to deliver shoeboxes, that will be pretty exciting," shares de Klein. "We are there for a week and we do six distributions to different communities and stuff."

According to de Klein, it could be March or even April before all of the shoeboxes have been delivered. But she says children in those countries do not celebrate Christmas the same way we do. She says they won't view it as a gift that arrived late.

De Klein says there was a lot of community involvement from the southeast this year. She notes a few new Churches came on board and recalls several people who walked in with ten or more boxes they had filled.

"I have one lady in Steinbach who packs boxes year round," says de Klein. "I picked up sixty boxes at her house."

She adds it was very exciting this year.

"God can use every box, it doesn't matter the number really," says de Klein. "Each of them is going to be a gift for someone special."