The Church Council Voted Me Off The Christmas Bazaar I’d Run For 30 Years Because I Was “Too Old-Fashioned.” Three Weeks Before Christmas, The New Chair Was On My Porch Holding My Donor Binder

For thirty years, the first Saturday of December belonged to me.

Anyone at Trinity Lutheran would tell you the same thing, usually with a roll of the eyes. “Ask Sybil.” Is it all right if my aunt brings her ceramic angels again even though nobody bought one last year? Ask Sybil, and Sybil will say yes, because your aunt is ninety and those angels are the reason she gets out of bed in November.

I’m 76. I started running the bazaar in 1996, the year our old chairwoman moved to Florida and nobody else raised a hand. My husband, Truett, raised mine for me. He grabbed my wrist and put it up in the air during the meeting, and when I glared at him, he whispered, “You’ve been rearranging her tables in your head for six years. Go ahead.”

The bazaar raises money for the Warm Homes Fund. It’s not glamorous. It pays for furnace repairs and overdue gas bills for families in our county who would otherwise be heating their kitchens with the oven door open. The county sends us a list every year. Last year there were sixty-one households on it. Some years it’s more.

When I started, we raised about $6,000. The last five years, we’ve averaged a little over $38,000.

It’s the cookie walk, where you get a plastic container and walk along a table of four hundred dozen homemade cookies, filling it up and paying by the pound. It’s Zelma Winters at the pie table, who is seventy-nine and still makes her own lard crust, and who will tell you to your face if your pie choice is a mistake. It’s the white elephant room and the ceramic angels and the raffle, because Vito Sarno of Sarno’s Hardware has donated a brand-new snowblower every year since 2004.

But mostly, it’s the letters.

Every November, I sit at my kitchen table and handwrite letters to about a hundred and forty people. Old members who moved away. Business owners. Widows who can’t make it down the basement stairs anymore but still want to help. I tell them how many families were on the list last year and what we did for them. I mention something particular to each one.

Truett used to sit across from me and lick the stamps, even after they made the self-stick kind. He said the old way tasted better. He died in March of 2019, and I’ve stuck every stamp myself since then, and I still miss the sound of him complaining about the glue.

Those letters bring in more than half the money. Every single year.

The Slideshow

In September, the church council asked me to come to their meeting “for a quick bazaar conversation.”

I brought a coffee cake. That’s how little I suspected.

The new member of council was a woman named Skye Treadway. She was forty-six, and she’d joined Trinity two years earlier when her family moved here from Columbus. She ran some kind of marketing consulting business from her house. She always wore a scarf, even in July.

She had a laptop hooked up to the television in the conference room.

“So, Sybil,” she said, smiling, “nobody is questioning what you’ve done. Thirty years! That’s incredible.”

When someone starts with “nobody is questioning,” I hold on to my purse.

The first slide said THE HOLIDAY MAKERS MARKET in sparkly letters. She explained that the bazaar’s “brand” was tired. Young families didn’t go to church basements to buy cookies by the pound. They went to curated markets.

She wanted to rent out booths to vendors at $150 each. She wanted to replace the cash box with a payment app, so every purchase could be made by scanning a code on a phone. She’d already talked to two food trucks. She had a DJ, a young man named Trace Young, who did weddings. She had arranged for a local influencer named Shiloh Vance, who had forty thousand followers, to come and post about it. There would be a selfie wall made of wrapping paper.

“And here’s the big one,” she said. “We move the whole thing digital. No more paper letters. We send one professional email blast with a QR code. It’s faster, it’s trackable and frankly it’s what donors expect in this decade.”

I sat there with my coffee cake on my lap.

Wyman Tisdale cleared his throat. Wyman has been on council for eleven years and has never once volunteered at the bazaar, though he does come every year to buy the same tin of pizzelles.

“I think what Skye is saying, Sybil,” he said, “is that the way you’ve been doing it is a little old-fashioned.”

“It is old-fashioned,” I said. “That’s why it works.”

He chuckled.

Pastor Tad Vickers was at the end of the table. He’s a good man, and young enough to be my son, and he hates conflict the way a cat hates a bath. “I think there’s a lot of exciting energy here,” he said. “And Sybil has given us so much. Maybe this is a chance to let her rest a little.”

Rest. As if I’d asked for it.

They voted. Six to three. Skye Treadway would chair the bazaar this year. I would be “honored” in the bulletin for thirty years of service.

Sondra Tullis, our treasurer, was one of the three who voted no.

On my way out, Skye stopped me in the hallway and touched my arm. “I hope you’re not upset. I really do want to honor what you built.”

“I’m not upset,” I said, which was a lie. “Do you have a question for me?”

“Actually, yes. The donor information. Do you have a spreadsheet?”

“I have a binder,” I said.

She laughed. She thought I was joking.

The Binder

I brought it to her house two days later.

It’s a white three-ring binder, about three inches thick, with a picture of a poinsettia that Truett cut out of a seed catalog taped to the front. Inside are a hundred and forty-some pages, one for each donor, in alphabetical order. Name, address and phone number at the top. Below that, in my handwriting, everything I know. How much they gave each year, whose husband passed and when, who wants a receipt and who will be insulted by one, who you never, ever call before noon.

Skye flipped through it on her front step. “Wow,” she said. “This is a lot.”

“It’s thirty years.”

“I can get all this into a spreadsheet in an afternoon.” She tapped the cover. “Honestly, Sybil, I think a lot of these people will be relieved not to get a letter they feel they have to answer.”

“They like a letter,” I said.

She smiled at me the way you smile at a child who has explained how airplanes fly. “Nobody reads letters anymore.”

I could have told her about the man in Indiana who sends his check with a reply on the back of my letter, every year, two pages long. But she’d already gone inside.

I went home and sat at my kitchen table. Across from me was Truett’s chair, and in front of the chair was the little ceramic dish where he used to keep the stamps.

“Well,” I said to the chair. “That’s that.”

November Without Letters

I’d like to tell you I took it well.

The first week of November, I took out my good stationery out of habit and put it back in the drawer. I baked my usual sixteen dozen spritz cookies for the cookie walk before I remembered there wasn’t going to be a cookie walk. There were going to be “artisan bakery vendors.” I put the spritz cookies in the freezer and felt foolish.

Then the phone started ringing.

Ulla Swanson called first. Ulla is eighty-eight, a retired bank officer, and she has given exactly $5,000 to the Warm Homes Fund every year for nineteen years. She has never mailed it. Every December, I go to her house, she makes coffee that could strip paint, and she hands me the check across her kitchen table after asking me for every number, which she writes in a little notebook.

“Sybil,” she said, “I received an email.”

“Did you?”

“It had a little box of dots in it. It says I should scan it with my phone.” She said “phone” the way some people say “snake.” “Where is my letter?”

I explained what had happened. There was a long silence.

“So I’m supposed to give five thousand dollars to a box of dots.”

“Ulla, please give anyway. The families still need it. Skye means well. Call her, and she’ll come to you.”

“I don’t know Skye,” Ulla said. “I know you. I’ll wait.” And she hung up.

Two days later, Vito Sarno called. He’d received a form letter asking if Sarno’s Hardware would like to “secure a vendor booth” for $150.

“A hundred and fifty dollars,” he said. “To stand in a church basement. Next to my own snowblower.”

“Did anyone ask about the snowblower?”

“Nobody asked about anything, Syb. Just the booth.”

Yetta Wolanski, who owns Wolanski’s Bakery on Main and donates sixty dozen kolaches every year, got the same booth letter. Nobody had asked her for kolaches.

I told every one of them to call Skye and give anyway. They all said some version of what Ulla said.

I didn’t say a word to Skye about any of this. I know how that sounds. I figured she’d see her numbers and come to me. She didn’t.

Market Day

The Holiday Makers Market was held on Saturday, December 5, at nine in the morning.

I went as a shopper in my red wool coat. At the bottom of my canvas tote, out of nothing but thirty years of habit, I had Truett’s green metal cash box, a roll of raffle tickets and forty dollars in small bills.

The first thing I noticed was the parking lot. It was nearly empty. The food trucks weren’t there. I found out later that the borough clerk, Velda Twombly, had told Skye two days earlier that vending from a truck on a public street needs a permit with a fourteen-day application. The trucks went to a high school basketball tournament instead.

The second thing I noticed was the sign on the door. It was beautiful. It had a QR code on it.

Inside, the fellowship hall was half full of tables and half full of nothing. Skye had booked twenty-two vendors. Nine had come. The others had gotten booths at the big craft show at the mall that same weekend and canceled by text the night before. The ones who came sold candles and earrings, and one man sold hot sauce. A young woman in a white coat was filming herself in front of the wrapping-paper selfie wall.

That was Shiloh Vance. Her forty thousand followers, I later learned, mostly lived in Cincinnati, two hours away. None of them came.

And then there was the music. Trace the DJ had set up two speakers the size of refrigerators in the corner, and he was playing a song with a lot of thumping in it and no words I could understand.

At 9:20, everything went dark.

The Breaker

The fellowship hall at Trinity was built in 1958. It has two electrical circuits worth talking about. One of them runs the kitchen, which was rewired in 1990 after Truett nearly caught fire making pancakes for the youth group. The other runs everything else, and it’s been sulking since Eisenhower.

You can run the lights and the coffee urn on that second circuit. You cannot run the lights and two refrigerator speakers. I’ve known that since 1997.

People stood in the dark holding their phones up like candles. Trace was saying, “Is that me?”

I walked to the back of the kitchen, past the industrial mixer, to the gray panel behind the broom closet door. Third breaker on the left is the hall. You push it all the way off first. You count to five. Then you push it back on firmly, like you mean it.

The lights came back.

I went over to Trace and told him, kindly, that if he wanted to live, he’d unplug from the wall by the stage and run an extension cord into the kitchen.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I used to work here,” I said.

He thanked me and didn’t move his cords. At 9:50 the lights went out again. I went back to the panel.

That was when I found Skye in the kitchen.

She was standing by the sink with her phone in both hands, and she was trying very hard not to cry. The payment app didn’t work. The church basement has always been a dead zone. It’s the stone foundation. Nobody could scan anything. Half the people who came, most of them over sixty, had brought cash anyway, because it was the Trinity Christmas bazaar and that’s what you did. But the vendors didn’t have change, and there was no cash box.

“I don’t understand,” Skye said. “I tested it. I tested it at home.”

“You tested it upstairs,” I said. “Everything works upstairs.”

I didn’t say anything else. I went back out and found the hot sauce man, who looked miserable, and I opened Truett’s green cash box on the end of his table. I made change for anyone who needed it. I wrote people receipts on my raffle ticket roll. By eleven, three of the vendors were sending their customers to me.

The only table in the room that was busy all morning was Zelma’s.

Zelma had told Skye in October that she would be bringing her pies whether anyone liked it or not. She’d been given a card table by the coat rack. She had a shoebox for money and a handwritten sign that said PIES $14 CASH OR GO HOME. She sold out of forty-two pies by 10:30.

By one o’clock, it was over. The vendors packed up.

Sondra counted the money that night. She called me at home.

“Four thousand one hundred and twelve dollars,” she said. “Twelve hundred of it is Zelma.”

“What about the email?”

“Eleven donations through the QR code. Total of $680.”

Last year we’d had over $21,000 from the letters alone.

I said good night and hung up and sat in my kitchen, and I didn’t feel good the way you’d think I might. Sixty-one families. Maybe more this year. I thought about a woman I’d met two winters ago, Mrs. Ybarra, who had three little boys sleeping in their coats until we got her furnace fixed.

I’d been right. And being right wasn’t going to fix anybody’s furnace.

The Porch

On Monday morning, at a quarter past eight, someone knocked on my front door.

It was Skye. She was holding my binder against her chest the way people hold things when they’re cold. She wasn’t wearing a scarf. I noticed that.

“Can I come in?” she said.

I let her in. I made coffee. It wasn’t as strong as Ulla’s, but it was strong enough for the occasion.

“I sent the email twice,” she said, and laughed, not happily. “My open rate was nine percent. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means nobody opened it.”

“I could have told you that.”

“I know you could have.” She looked up at me. “Why didn’t you?”

That was a fair question, and I made myself answer it honestly. “Because you’d voted me off,” I said. “And part of me wanted to watch.”

She nodded. I think she respected that more than if I’d lied.

“Sondra says we’re thirty-four thousand short of last year,” she said. “And there are sixty-seven families on the county list this time. I called a few donors from the spreadsheet on Sunday. Mr. Sarno told me to call you. Mrs. Wolanski told me to call you. Some woman named Ulla hung up on me.”

“That’s Ulla.”

“I don’t know how to fix this.” She put both hands flat on the binder. “I’m asking you to help me. Please. I’ll do whatever you tell me.”

I looked at her for a long time. I thought about the way Wyman had chuckled.

Then I got up, went to the drawer by the stove and brought back two boxes of my good cream stationery and a cup of pens.

“Sit down,” I said. “Do you have decent handwriting?”

A Hundred and Forty Letters

We wrote for four nights.

Skye came at six every evening after her kids were in bed, and we sat at my kitchen table with the binder open between us. I’d read her a page aloud. I’d tell her who this person was and what they cared about. Then one of us would write the letter, and the other would read it before it went in the envelope.

Her first letter, to a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Tatum, started with “Dear Valued Supporter.”

I tore it in half.

“You’ve never valued her,” I said. “You’ve never met her. Her husband was a mail carrier for thirty-one years, and he died in 2017, and she gives forty dollars every year because she says he would have. Write that you’re sorry you didn’t get to know him.”

She started over. Her second letter was a full page and had nothing about value in it.

By the second night, she was asking questions before I could tell her. “What happened with this one’s grandson? Did he get the job?” By the third night, she was laughing at my old notes in the margins. Next to one man’s name, I’d written: “Generous. Also a crook. Do not let him near the raffle.”

I’d told her she had to sign them all. “You’re the chair,” I said. “They need to know who you are. They already know me.”

Her hand cramped on the third night. I gave her a bag of frozen peas for her wrist. She held it there and looked at Truett’s chair.

“Was that his?”

“It was.”

“Would he have liked me?”

I thought about it. “He’d have liked you a lot better this week than in September.”

She laughed so hard she had to put the peas down.

On the fourth night, we put the last stamp on the last envelope. She went to lick it, then stopped and looked at me.

“These are self-stick,” she said.

“Lick it anyway,” I said. “For Truett.”

She did. She made a face. I told her he would have been delighted.

Coffee With Ulla

I took Skye to Ulla’s house on Tuesday afternoon.

Ulla answered the door in her pearls, looked Skye up and down, and said, “You’re the box of dots.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Skye said. “I’m the box of dots.”

Ulla poured coffee. Skye took a sip and her eyes watered, which pleased Ulla.

Then Ulla took out her little notebook and asked Skye every question she usually asked me. How many families? Sixty-seven. How many furnaces? Skye didn’t know. I didn’t help her. Ulla waited. Skye said, “I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out and I’ll call you by Friday.” Ulla wrote that down.

“Why didn’t you come to see me in the first place?” Ulla asked.

“Because I thought it would be faster not to,” Skye said.

“Was it?”

“No, ma’am.”

Ulla closed her notebook. She took out her checkbook, wrote slowly, and tore out the check. She handed it across the table to Skye, not to me.

It was for $6,000.

“Five is for the families,” Ulla said. “One is for the trouble of having to look at that dot box. Don’t ever send it to me again.”

The same week, Skye went to Sarno’s Hardware with a coffee cake that she’d baked herself. It was lopsided. Vito told me later he ate the whole thing standing up in the stockroom. He donated the snowblower that afternoon, and two space heaters for the families list, and he told her if she ever sent him a booth fee again he’d charge her for the coffee cake pan.

Yetta Wolanski agreed to the kolaches after Skye spent a morning in the bakery’s back room learning to fold them badly.

The Second Saturday

We held a second bazaar on December 19, the Saturday before Christmas.

Wyman said it was a terrible idea. Sondra said it was the only idea.

We did it the old way. Zelma had a real table this time, right by the door. The church women had six days’ notice and still filled the cookie walk with three hundred dozen cookies, including my sixteen dozen spritz from the freezer. Yetta’s kolaches went in the first hour. Vito’s snowblower sat on a pallet by the stage with a raffle jar in front of it, and Truett’s green cash box sat at the end of the cookie table, where it has always belonged.

But I’ll be fair. Skye added things, and some of them were good.

She’d set up a corner for young families with a photo booth where kids could sit on Santa’s lap. Santa was Pastor Tad, who wore the beard upside down for the first twenty minutes. She had a laptop at the door so younger people could donate on their phones before they came downstairs, while they still had a signal. It brought in almost $3,000.

And Trace the DJ came back. He played Christmas carols at a reasonable volume, plugged into an outlet in the kitchen with an orange extension cord.

The lights didn’t go out once.

People came. Some had gotten a letter. Some saw the posters Skye’s kids put up at the grocery store. One couple drove in from Indiana. It was the man who writes the two-page letters on the back of mine, and his wife, who said she had to see the woman he’d been writing to all these years.

Sondra came over that night to tell me in person, with her coat still on.

“Forty-one thousand two hundred and six dollars,” she said. “Including Saturday the fifth.”

It was the most the bazaar had ever raised.

Co-Chair

The council met again in January.

Skye stood up at the beginning of the meeting, before the minutes, and said she had a motion. She moved that the bazaar have two co-chairs from now on, and that one of them be Sybil Yandell.

It passed nine to nothing.

Pastor Tad asked if I’d like to say anything. I’d been thinking about it since September.

“I accept,” I said. “On two conditions. The DJ plugs into the kitchen. And he plays carols.”

Everyone laughed. Skye laughed hardest.

Then I looked down the table at Wyman, who was holding his pen and trying very hard to look like he’d been on my side all along.

“And Wyman,” I said, “old-fashioned paid for two hundred and twelve furnace repairs. You’re welcome to come see how it’s done. We start licking stamps the first of November.”

He bought two tins of pizzelles at the next bazaar. I’ve accepted that as his apology.

The Stamps

Skye and I write the letters together now. She does the younger donors, and I do the people who remember Truett. She makes fun of my binder and borrows it every week.

Some of my way should change. I’ll admit that. But nobody gives five thousand dollars to a box of dots, and Skye figured that out in one bad Saturday. It took me thirty years, with a man across the table licking stamps the whole time.

If someone in your life still writes real letters, or still runs something the old way because it works, send this to them. Then go buy a pie from them. Cash.

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