LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL:
FROM FAIR TO FUN DAY

The Church Council, which represents all the different groups, organizations and committees at All Souls, is planning an all-church event for next April to further its stated goal of community building. “Fun Day,” now scheduled for Saturday April 5, 2008, will be an intergenerational effort to raise modest amounts of money for use in necessary in-church projects while all the participants enjoy working together and having fun. The idea is to have a low-price silent auction of services that church members can offer, merchandize solicited from neighborhood merchants by other groups, children’s activities, food services, baked goods sales and anything else any group can suggest. All church groups will be asked to participate, including church school children and their parents.

Those of you who have been around long enough will remember the days of the All Souls Church Fair. An event first sponsored by the Women’s Alliance as far back as the 19th century and open to the public after 1926, the Fair was an all-church affair in which all groups and all ages participated. Children were drafted to run the coat room, teen-agers helped serve the seated dinner that was a component early on, and other groups solicited merchants for gifts, worked all year on simple crafts to sell, baked cookies, assembled potted plants for sale, sorted donated goods, books, even clothes at one time, and helped set up carefully decorated tables designed around a specific theme where other members sold the goods. The Fair ran Friday night for members only and was open to the public on Saturday. The Antiques table attracted many outside antiques merchants on those Saturday mornings.

For many years, the Fair raised a considerable amount of money that eventually was used to fund our growing out-reach programs. The biggest money-maker was the auction part of the Fair which was eventually separated from that event in order to raise larger sums for outreach from the wider community. The separate Auction has been a great success, but without the auction, the Fair could not generate enough revenue to justify the enormous amount of year-round work required to mount the huge event. And so the Fair was gone.

What is not gone is the need to create a new event in which all members of the church can participate to the extent that they are able. Fun Day will be a much more modest event than the Fair used to be and it will not compete with either the big Auction in February or the Women’s Alliance Holiday Gift Table in November. The fund-raising goals for Fun Day will be modest with the major emphasis of the event being on friendship building through a shared effort. Currently, a Planning Committee is being organized by the Church Council and anyone who would like to be part of that group should now volunteer their service and ideas to Church Council Chair Arthur Hopkirk.

The first Fun Day project suggested by the ministers and church administration is to raise money for new pew cushions for the Sanctuary. If we can’t raise enough money in one year, we will try to complete the project with Fun Day 2009.