The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
I have spent most of the past two days shuttling back and forth between Wadesboro and West Jefferson. Our Rotary Club is selling Christmas wreaths this year as a fundraiser, and I volunteered to make the three-hour drive to West End Wreaths and pick up our order. It didn’t occur to me that: 1) our club would sell so many, and 2) wreaths are so bulky.
I could only fit 100 of the 160 we needed in the bed of my Tacoma, so I wound up having to make a second trip. Well, there are worse things in the world than a late fall drive in the mountains.
Grappling with the logistics of getting dozens of wreaths ordered, sorted and distributed has reminded me of the annual fundraising project I helped with in high school. I played violin (poorly) in junior high and high school orchestra, and every year the Port Clinton Music Boosters sponsored a holiday fruit sale. Music Boosters was a nonprofit organization that raised money to help fund music education in our schools. They used the money to buy instruments, uniforms and sheet music. The fruit sale was their big annual event and would regularly raise upward of $5,000; no small amount in 1980. Orchestra, band and chorale members would begin soliciting orders for oranges and grapefruit around Halloween and, sometime just after Thanksgiving, a truck, straight from sunny Florida, would pull up to the Lutheran church across the street from our school. Select music students – I’d like to say the hard-working, responsible ones, but the more likely truth is we were the brown-nosers – were excused from class for the day to help sort, box and distribute the orders.
Orange and grapefruit boxes could be ordered in two sizes, and there was also a combo box of half each. The truck delivered only large boxes of one fruit or the other. We would first lay all the large box orders out on the gym floor and then start making up the small and combo boxes. By the end of the day, the gym was stacked with individual orders ready for pick up. It was hard work, but we didn’t care because in the mind of a 16-year-old anything is better than algebra.
The big problem with this fundraiser was that boxes of fruit are bulky, and a family selling more than three or four often ran into a transportation problem. In those days, most families drove cars – giant, battleship-like cars, I will grant you, but still just cars with a limited amount of cargo space. Like my multiple trips to the mountains, families often had to make a couple of trips in order to claim all the fruit they had ordered.
As for my family, we typically bought one combo box and left it at that, although my older sister occasionally bought a box, too. Noting the aforementioned logistics challenges, I didn’t go out of my way to sell to friends and neighbors like some of the other kids did. It wasn’t that I was (especially) lazy, but my mother barely drove – and when she did you certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near that car – and my father worked long hours that made picking up and delivering boxes of fruit a challenge.
Catholic Christmas Seals, on the other hand, were right up my alley. Heck, you could carry dozens of those home in your book bag, and efficiently deliver them to your customers on foot. Catholic Christmas Seals were books of stamps which good little Catholic schoolchildren sold during the holiday season to … uh … well … to be honest, I have no idea what the money was used for, but I’m sure it was a good Catholic cause. The stamps came in “books” with five pages of 10 stamps each. Each page sold for $1, $5 for the whole book. They weren’t postage stamps, just a cute design that usually incorporated a drawing of the “Mother and Child,” often with angels, and less often with Joseph, donkeys, sheep and shepherds. You put them on the back of your Christmas card envelopes to show that you supported whatever Catholic cause the money was used for. (As an aside, I’m sure my sales pitch was better and more convincing without the sarcasm.)
Catholic Christmas Seals were both a fundraiser and a contest, and students could win “prizes” for selling a certain number of books. Now, this was Catholic elementary school, not reality, so the prizes weren’t bikes or footballs or model cars, they were little plastic statues of Jesus and Mary, and for the very top sellers, a six-inch lucite cross with an image of Jesus molded into it.
I wanted that cross, BADLY, but the requirement was 10 books. Raising $50 would be a fair challenge for a grade-schooler today, but in 1972 it was an almost ridiculous goal. Nevertheless, I hit up every neighbor, aunt, uncle, cousin and godparent and made the target with books to spare, earning me not only the coveted lucite cross, but a Virgin Mary statuette to boot! My mother was so proud that she displayed those “trophies” on a shelf in our living room well into my high school years.
There won’t be any lucite crosses handed out for Rotary wreath sales, although a couple of club members certainly deserve one. Four of our members sold 15 or more wreaths, and one sold 47! When all is said and done, the club will net about $2,500, which, while no Music Boosters fruit sale, is a nice addition to our fund balance in a year when more traditional methods of fundraising have been eliminated or significantly reduced by COVID-19. Perhaps more importantly than the money, though, the wreath fundraiser has given our club a sense of purpose and engagement during a time when in-person meetings and get-togethers are not possible.