Sellers pray to the Saint of Real Estate for help
Go, Saint Joe! The patron saint of real estate is being invoked en masse in correlation with the recent drop in homes sales to the lowest level in five years. One report said sales of the St. Joseph Home Sale kit have “risen almost 100 percent in recent weeks.” For the math-challenged, that means its main marketeer, the Catholic Company, is selling twice as many as usual.
The kit includes a dandy 31/2-inch plastic statue of St. Joseph - the carpenter husband of Mary - nicely boxed with the little saint peering through a cellophane window, for $7.95, plus shipping. There is a discount for volume purchases. The kit contains a prayer to pray to St. Joseph and instructions clarifying that the contents are not to be used for superstitious purposes.
However, Nicholas Cole, director of business development for the Catholic Company, points out, “Sales of the home sale kits are a surprisingly accurate gauge of the housing market.”
These are no snake oil salesmen, though. No, no. The Catholic Company catalog underscores to potential buyers that superstitions about burying the statue upside down, 12 inches in the ground under your real estate sign, are just that.
It is about devotion - at least once you have made your online purchase. You may set St. Joseph in any place of honor in your home, the catalog states.
You KNOW every buyer who reads about the superstition NOT to be followed will rip poor St. Joseph out of his cellophane, run out to the For Sale sign, look around to see who is watching, and then do the dirty superstitious deed.
A note to our many fine South Side Catholic readers: I am NOT poking fun at St. Joseph or at the practice of praying to saints or any other “get your butt out of its sticky wicket” methodologies learned from our ancestors. I had instilled in me fear and reverence: fear that if I did such a thing, my Irish Catholic grandmother would return from her grave (God rest her soul), armed with that black iron frying pan, and chase me down as I’d seen her do to my uncle Bruce after she learned of his arrest in a bar scrap.
Though Bruce was at least 16 inches taller than Grandma, I beheld his desperate leap across a porch rail, followed by a hard landing on the sidewalk below and a roll on the ground, all to flee her wrath. Some of you learned fear and reverence at the feet of the same grandmother.
I have little reverence for hawkers of religious products, however.
And while I can’t imagine ordering the little St. Joe statue myself - much less the special deluxe St. Joseph sales kit that includes a shamrock key chain - I don’t have to live in anyone else’s sticky wicket.
It’s no fun selling a house under pressure in a slow market. There’s a lot at stake -enough to drive you to prayer or superstition.
I will confess to my own “house” superstitions. I scatter sage around after certain guests have blessed my home with their damp energy. I’m convinced it helps clean things up.
Sage is cheap. I can grow it in a box in the kitchen.
And so are prayers.