BELFAST - Dawn Voigt stood in the kitchen of the Parish House at First Church, bearing down on a tangle of red ribbon and wire. Ten minutes and a couple good stories later, she held up a bow for a holiday wreath. It was her 810th in two weeks and so perfect you could almost take it for granted.

There were still a dozen left to do that night, and though it was dark outside and everyone else had gone home Voigt wasn’t cutting any corners. If someone wanted a wreath with a squashed bow, she said, coaxing the last hint of struggle out of the gentle loops of the one she held in her hands, they could go to a big chain store.

Whether it’s these little details or something else, the annual wreath sale at First Church UCC has been about as popular as the volunteer wreath makers can handle. The high-ceilinged Parish Hall next to the kitchen where Voigt worked on bows was full of completed wreaths, almost all of which were spoken for, ordered in advance by local residents and businesses.

The wreath project is the largest annual fundraiser for First Church. It’s been running continuously since 1930 when a young parishioner, Avis Howell, is said to have started it out of her mother’s kitchen.

Today, between 45 and 50 volunteers work on the project. There are decorators like Voigt, who start working in the week before Thanksgiving to get a couple hundred wreaths in the mail, and then reconvene the next week to fill 500-plus additional local orders. Further behind the scenes, there are volunteers who drill holes in chestnuts and acorns and string them with wire to be attached to the wreaths.

“People are doing that it their cellars, their garages, their barns,” Voigt said.

Others collect pine cones and moss throughout the year. Some saw pine cones or bake them in their ovens, a process that tames the pitchy cones of common White Pines.

“It’s almost a cottage industry out there,” she said.

Piper Mountain Christmas Trees supplies the bare wreaths in sizes ranging from 8-inches across the center hole up to 48 inches. All the raw materials are assembled at the Parish House. Volunteer drivers mostly deliver the finished goods. Though on a recent occasion, a large wreath ordered by a bank proved too big for the driver’s car and he and Voigt walked it over.

“If we didn’t look like fools,” she said. “And both of us are short. We were trying not to drag it on the ground.”

Voigt has been making bows for wreath sale since she started coming to First Church 15 years ago. The first she heard of it was from a parishioner named Clara, who reminded Voigt of the austere wife in the painting American Gothic, reprimanding the congregation over a lack of volunteers:

“She said, ‘Look, somebody’s gotta get out of these pews and help us with this wreath project, because if you don’t it won’t get done, and we’ll all be dead.’”

All of the wreath decorators at the time were in their 80s, Voigt said, so the threat made a certain amount of sense. Out of fear or a sense of duty, she sought out the woman during a break in the service. “I practically chased her down,” she said.

In the past few years, the core group of volunteers has waned again, and in the same way — the usual helpers getting too old to keep up with the physical demands of the project and not enough younger members coming aboard.

Voigt has her thoughts on generational priorities, and if it came down to giving her own version of Clara’s speech, she could probably do it. As of Sunday evening, year number 84 of the wreath project looked to be almost done, and Voigt was going to be the one to put a bow on it.

First Church happens to be on the itinerary of Wreaths Across America. The annual convoy of tractor trailers delivering wreaths from Harrington, Maine to Arlington Cemetery in Washington DC, will be coming through Belfast on Sunday, Dec. 7 in the early afternoon, making stops at Bank of America and First Chuch. Rev. Joel Krueger said Wreaths Across America has scheduled a service at First Church at 1:30 p.m.. He wasn’t sure if the entire fleet of trucks would attempt to come into downtown Belfast.

Either way, there will be wreaths.

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com