Our Lady of The Cedars of Lebanon Church

Our Lady of the Cedars of Lebanon started the Lebanese Festival in August 2010, and it has been ongoing annually without interruption. The reason behind having the festival is to achieve a threefold goal:

• To unify our parish family which is made of various backgrounds

• To share our five-thousand-year Phoenician-Lebanese culture with our New England American community, and

• To raise fund in order to help the parish financially

Year after year, the Lebanese Festival has been growing, and our threefold goal is gradually and simultaneously being achieved.

The Autumn Extravaganza Raffle

The Autumn Extravaganza Raffle takes place in the elegant Richard Cardinal Cushing Maronite Community Center which has recently just been completely renovated. It always takes place on the second Saturday of November and basically occurs six months after the festival. As a fundraiser, this event started in 2014 as an alternative to the parish Bazaar.

It was a heart break to stop the Bazaar, a long-time parish fall activity, because of the many challenges that the parish was facing: The shortage of people committing to such undertaking; the heavy workload, the great responsibilities, the long months of preparation that the Bazaar imposed; the growing competition and the scanty revenues…! Therefore, a decision had to be made in order to make the event financially successful.

The Autumn Extravaganza Raffle fundraiser became the alternative. A completely new concept was introduced. The goal is to sell five-hundred tickets, in and outside the parish, at $100.00 each and raffle off $15,000.00 in prizes. With such strategy, the workload is distributed among many individuals and more people are involved, the expenses are cut, the working period is shortened and the entire event is completed in ONE DAY. Thus, the Autumn Extravaganza Raffle fundraiser is a fun-filled one-day-event, featuring a Lebanese dinner, a live band with dancing and music, and raffle drawing. The prizes consist of a $10,000.00 grand prize in cash, other cash prizes and Gift Baskets, along with prizes like a mini iPad, a flat TV screen, a digital camera, an Apple Watch, just to name of few.