About Operation Christmas Child: Amazing Facts

• It is the world's largest Christmas project.
   

• This year, Operation Christmas Child will hand-deliver more than 8 million shoe box gifts to hurting kids worldwide.
   

• Lined up end-to-end, the 61 million shoe boxes collected since 1993 would stretch from Anchorage, Alaska to Hong Kong—and back again.
   

• If all 61 million children who have received shoe boxes since 1993 stood hand-in-hand, they would form a line stretching 42,192 miles-more than enough to reach all the way around the world.
   

• Operation Christmas Child has generated more than 2,800 miles of smiles since 1993-enough smiles to reach from Seattle to Miami.
   

• Operation Christmas Child will use whatever means necessary-truck, boat, plane, helicopter, donkey, dog sled, even camel-to bring shoe boxes to children in more than 90 countries.
   

• Just two years after Hurricane Katrina inflicted devastating losses on the people of Louisiana, residents rallied with renewed generosity by collecting 112,576 shoe box gifts - a state record!  
  

• Every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan has packed a shoe box gift for Operation Christmas Child.
   

• To wrap each of the 8 million shoe boxes packed this year would require an estimated 470,588 rolls of wrapping paper.
  
  

• Operation Christmas Child delivers shoe boxes to Timbuktu and beyond . . . litterally.  In 2007, children in the town of Timbuktu in the West African country of Mali received shoe box gifts for the first time.