Sunday Smiles #2 - Mustard Seed Relief Mission, Love in a Box 2013

This week marked the official beginning of Christmas for me and there is no better way to kick off the festivities then to donate to charity.

This is the first year I’ve had a little bit of money floating about I decided that it was time I tried to help somebody else. I did a little digging around and found a charity called Mustard Seed Relief Mission who run a program called Love in a Box every year.

Mustard Seed is a UK based charity, now in its 20^th year of mission work. The idea of Love in a Box is that you get an average sized shoe box, fill it with Christmas presents, wrap it up and then Mustard Seed will make sure it gets to an under privileged child somewhere in Eastern Europe.

This is something I did as a child in Primary School and I’ve always remembered getting really excited about putting the box together because it was something I could get actively involved in. All these years later and I still got excited about the program because I’m still a big kid and sentimentality sometimes gets the better of me.

So I found myself a shoe box and got myself down to (big surprise) Poundland. As a rule, I don’t get a basket when I walk into Poundland for fear that I will leave the shelves bare if I do. But this week I threw all caution to the wind and ransacked that place as if it was closing down. I ended up with this little pile of gems:

Now I don’t know if it’s just me but if you had given me all of that when I was 4-years-old I would have been the happiest little chipmunk you ever did see. There are toys in there, books, crayons, sweets and a few essentials that Mustard Seed specifically suggest for the age range I chose (toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, face cloth.)

All of this would have been enough to make me smile but the sheer Christmas magic didn’t stop there. A few of the people I work with said that they wanted to get involved too and before I knew it I was carting 25 boxes over to a little village in Staines for Mustard Seed to collect.

I might point out that the really typical image you get when someone mentions the word ‘village’ is EXACTLY where I had to deliver the boxes to. I’m talking streams, farms, pub (singular), shop (again singular), dirt tracks and giant houses. It was cold, it was November and it was just about the most Christmassy thing I have ever done in my entire life.

So that was what plastered a smile on my face this week. It was a lot of fun and I will definitely be doing it again next year and perhaps I’ll even run a proper drive at work!

You can read all about Mustard Seed and Love in a Box here:

http://www.msrm.org.uk/liab.html

Till next time!