Some people are having a big laugh over the St. Joseph sell-your-house superstition. The idea, in case you're not from a Catholic town, is that you buy a $5 plastic figurine of St. Joseph -- the guy who got stuck supporting Baby Jesus even though the alleged real father skipped town, never to be seen again. Then you dunk this thing in the dirt outside your house, head first, facing the street (or the house).
And then, magically, your home sells ... even during a horrible Housing Bubble Collapse that is systemically taking down the entire world's economy.
How does it work? In my family's case, it worked because we simultaneously cut the price far beyond what the greedy real-estate bubble agents suggested. That was the true miracle: a house in Nevada selling for what it was worth. People should try it. Turns out that 2005 house prices were a much bigger fantasy than God impregnating some gal just so His Only Son could live in obscurity for 30-odd years before having a short, failed career as a street preacher and then getting executed by the Italians.
Anyway, after a month or three back in Los Angeles, it suddenly occurred to me that our loyal plastic St. Joseph was still head first in the frozen dirt of Northern Nevada. We forgot to dig him up and give him a "place of honor" in our new (rented) home. What to do?
It only took a few minutes on the Internet to find alternate rules about the Josephian Tradition. We should leave the old Joseph inaction figure and buy a new trinket to put in a place of honor.
Well, sure. In our dangerous economic times, it would be irresponsible to not buy another religious trinket. But this time, I could shop around for a truly handsome voodoo figurine. It would have a lofty position upon the living room bookcase.
I found a shop in Jerusalem that markets hand-carved olive-wood biblical figures, for the Christian Pilgrims who still show up to see the Gospel locations picked at random by the Roman Emperor Constantine's crazed mom three-hundred years after the reported crucifixion of Jesus and more than two centuries after Jerusalem had been leveled by her own Empire. The olive trees grow right there where Jesus supposedly gave his "Uhh .... " prayer to his deadbeat dad. Only forty bucks!
A few weeks later, a nice box arrived from Israel. The wooden idol was much bigger than I expected, and the carving style is (paradoxically) similar to the Eastern Church's famous icons.
We put the statue on the bookshelves. My two-year-old was fascinated by the "man made out of wood," and he is allowed to play with The Man now and then. But we remind our kid to be careful, because this creepy wooden character is the guy who helped us sell the Nevada house before the whole market completely collapsed.