It's Christmas! (Sort Of)

Despite only just turning our calendar to September, we're already knee-deep (almost literally) in processing all of the Christmas cards and gifts from our sponsors to send out to their sponsored children all over the world.

Because we know how strange it is for you to receive a Christmas card to send in the middle of summer, we thought you might like to see some of the journey that your cards go through here in the UK before they head out to the specific Area Development Programmes (ADPs) and their children.

It all starts when our friendly neighbourhood postie arrives in the morning and unloads what must be almost the entire contents of his van into our reception area.

Seriously, this is just one day's worth of post - that's a lot of wonderfully generous supporters sending cards, gifts and donations for their sponsored children. It never fails to make us grateful. 

Once we managed to get the bags and crates of mail into the lift and up to the Income Processing team (we prefer to call it the Grotto), the cards are all checked and the donations removed for processing.

Staff and volunteers work from the beginning of August to start working their way through your cards in order to get them out to our projects in time for Christmas. People from right across the organisation give their time to head upstairs for a bit of early Christmas cheer.

Once they've been opened and processed, the cards and gifts then need to be sorted by continent, country and project. As you can see below, it needs everyone to wear their concentration face.  

After they are sorted, everything is packed up into project-coded boxes and prepared to be shipped out to our ADPs all over the world. 

Although it may seem far too early to be thinking about Christmas, we love this period at World Vision - it's genuinely heart-warming to see and experience such generosity from our supporters.

There's no age limit to helping out in the grotto, either - to finish up we thought we'd share a photo of our newest team member. We've been assured she was working incredibly hard, which is why she's on a quick nap break.

What's your favourite thing about sending in your Christmas cards? Let us know and join the discussion on Facebook.