Mark your calendars and start looking in your ATTICS, BASEMENTS, and CLOSETS!!

This annual event provides everyone with the best of buys and opportunities for short-term service to the church and the community. It is a wonderful way to raise funds for worthy community organizations and a great opportunity for fellowship in our parish community. You can help to make this event a success by being a donor, a buyer and/or a volunteer.

Terrific volunteers have made this wonderful celebration of goodwill a reality for the community for the past 40 years. Last year $20,000 from the sale was donated to a variety of community services and organizations. Whether you participate to raise badly needed funds; to experience the excitement, tradition and fellowship that is part of this sale; to empty your closets, drawers or attics; or to shop for an incredible variety of merchandise at bargain basement prices; you make it all happen.

Volunteers serve in donating, sorting, arranging, picking up, pricing and selling merchandise, and in preparing the church for, and cleaning up after, the sale. The return each year of our volunteers from prior years really makes the sale possible and successful. Please check in the Help Wanted section of Crossings for specific opportunities to join this enthusiastic and capable group of parishioners.

We will need volunteers in all departments, a few vans and trucks (with drivers) for pick-ups, a strong and hardy clean up crew and possibilities for storage until the sale week. Peggy and Ted Pratt are the chairs for this year’s sale. Katherine Dauchert and Betsy Elkins-Williams will work closely with the chairs and will chair the sale in 2004. We still need chairs for several departments. Please call Peggy or Ted if you have an interest or wish to find out more. A meeting for all department chairs will be held in mid-February. Please call Peggy or Ted (919-493-8059) if you have a specific interest or wish to find out more.

The Sale Departments are Accessories, Adult Recreation, Bake Shop, Books, Children’s Toys, Children’s Clothing, Men’s Clothing, Women’s Clothing, Home Furnishings, Garden Shop, Linens, Treasures, and White Elephant. Other committees using volunteers are Publicity, Sorting, Parking, Cleanup, Sale Monitors and Greeters, Treasurer, and liaisons from Carol Woods and Carolina Meadows.

The Social Ministry Committee is now soliciting requests for funds from charitable organizations and will make recommendations to the vestry for disbursement of the sale proceeds. A subcommittee of the ABC Sale chairs and representatives of the Social Ministry Committee will be receiving requests through March.