Hartsville, S.C.

Minerva Ketter lost her home gently, over time, as her listing house sank around her. The ceiling let in rain, the floors let in light, and the front porch gradually sagged until it was almost in the front yard. Finally, she had to abandon her ramshackle house and move in with her father next door.

Then one day last spring volunteers swarmed like carpenter ants over the Hartsville, S.C., neighborhood, slapping paint, hammering walls, shingling roofs, shoring up porches. By day's end, Ketter's house, like 37 others in town, had been delivered from ruin. "I didn't know something like this could happen," marveled Ketter, 34, who is pregnant with her second child. "This will make all the difference in my life."

If it felt to Ketter like Christmas in April, that's because it was. Each spring the Washington-based Christmas in April program coordinates thousands of volunteers in 50 cities and towns from Vermont to California in renovating more than a thousand homes that are near collapse. Better to rebuild old dwellings, they figure, than to build new homeless shelters. In one day of hard work the 1,000 Hartsville volunteers used 400 gal. of paint, 800 lbs. of nails, 7,000 ft. of lumber, 5,000 squares of shingles and 200 bags of cement, all paid for by local donations with an enviable provision: if they fell short, Sonoco Products Co., a plastics-packaging giant acting as sponsor, would write a check for the difference.

For the beneficiaries, the arrival of Christmas in April was a gift beyond measure. Janie and Lyde Hawkins have been married since 1925; theirs was a dismal home, in dire need of a new roof, porch and windows. "We ain't got to pay for it?" Janie asked coordinator Trish Lunn every time she came by.

"No, not one dime," Lunn replied.

"The Lord bless you for that."