FESTIVE boxes created by Herefordshire residents are being sent to Eastern Europe to give less fortunate children a brighter Christmas.

At St Joseph's RC Primary school, in Ross-on-Wye, the tally has already reached 85 gift boxes with families, staff and friends of the school all taking part.

Acting headteacher Bernie Davies said: "When the children are trying to think about what to give to someone in another country who has nothing, it really helps them to appreciate all that they have.

"As the value we are focussing on this month is unity, it's also a great chance to show how we can care about others, even when we haven't met them."

Meanwhile, children at Madley Primary School have also been busy creating Christmas boxes to send overseas. Sally Giles, Madley Primary School administrator, said: "We have about 100 Christmas boxes now and they are being picked up this week.

"The children have been working on them since half term and, in the new year, we should receive an update about how the project went."

And, thanks to the generosity of a Hereford businessman, thousands of children will get the Christmas charity goodies delivered on time.

Operation Christmas Child organisers were two weeks behind schedule with no space to prepare 22,000 shoeboxes full of gifts donated by county people for transportation.

So when a friend told Elwyn Roberts of the problem, he cleared 5,000 sq ft at his Rotherwas Industrial Estate warehouse to help volunteers get the job done.

Regional co-ordinator for the Samaritan's Purse charity scheme, Brian Hodges, said: "He's been amazing. We went to him on a Wednesday and by Monday, he had cleared the space for us."

Brian's wife Elizabeth and volunteers are now sealing and loading 22,000 donated shoeboxes five days a week on to lorries driving weekly to Kyrgyzstan and the Crimean Republic.

Elizabeth said: "We had nowhere. We should have been going in a fortnight but we still had nowhere to do it and were thinking we would have to ship the donations off somewhere else to be packed."

Elwyn said it had taken a day to clear the space at Wye Valley Engineering but added that helping the cause had also helped him.

He said: "When you have space you tend to fill it, so there was stuff scattered around that could have been cleared before - it did us a favour really as it was a job that needed doing anyway."

Last year, Samaritan's Purse, which organises Operation Christmas Child, sent 1.24 million shoeboxes from the UK to children in hospitals, orphanages and homeless shelters across Central and Eastern Europe, Mozambique, Swaziland and Liberia.