Yesterday I put the “For Sale By Owner” sign in front of my townhouse.  I also buried my St. Joseph statue yesterday - before setting out the sign.  There is a tradition (superstition?) mostly among Catholics that since St. Joseph is the patron saint of the home that if you bury a St. Joseph statue UPSIDE-DOWN in a favored place in the yard of the house you want to sell, the house will sell quickly.

About seven years ago when I sold a house by myself for the first time, a few months went by - and no buyers.  While talking with some friends, someone mentioned the St. Joseph story.  I immediately got on the phone and started calling around and found St. Mary’s Bookstore in Nashville that carried the little statues.  When I got there, I found that they not only had the statues, they had all sizes of the statue and actually had St. Joseph home sale KITS - with a statue, a laminated prayer and a history of the custom. 

I took my statue home, buried it immediately in my favorite spot of the yard.  I read the prayer.  Within 24 hours, my house sold!

Three years later, the same thing happened and one year after that I did it again. 

St. Joseph Home Sale Kit

Now I’m hoping that this fourth time will be the charm.  Each time I’ve moved I’ve dug up the statue, cleaned it and put it in a “place of honor” in my new home.  I have a friend who wanted to borrow my statue because it obviously was a very lucky one.  I don’t know.  It has been 18 hours since I put up the sign, and I haven’t had a single phone call.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 2nd, 2006 at 10:03 am and is filed under Family, That's My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.