"These are my bell-ringing pants," said the former high school business teacher, who worked stints at Southside, Central and Northside before retiring.
Carey is a tall, slender fellow, and these are some tall, slender pants. Still, it's their colors that are most arresting, with wide lengths of red, green, blue and yellow stretching from his waist to where the cuffs would be, if they had any.
They are, to be sure, pants you can't ignore.
That's a good thing, Carey insists, when you are hoping to attract donors and their dollars to the kettles.
"It does help," said the 74-year-old Holy Trinity Lutheran Church member, whose passions, besides fly-fishing, include helping the Salvation Army. "And I love wearing them."
It was about 20 Christmases ago when Carey spotted an unattended kettle at a now-defunct grocery store near his home.
"Well, that bothered me," he recalled. "I went to the Salvation Army and asked if they'd ever tried getting churches involved in this?"
As it turned out, they had, but to little avail. Carey volunteered to see what he could do, and before long he had recruited 27 churches to help man the kettle sites.
These days a smaller number of churches help, but Carey still heads up Holy Trinity's efforts, filling seven days of ringing -- what amounts to 70 hours worth -- at Tillotson Avenue's Marsh Supermarket the week before Christmas.
That's why on this cold, gray, snowy afternoon he was going over his red and green schedule, checking the names and phone numbers of this year's volunteers against those who had volunteered last year, preparing to recruit more helpers.
"I'm gonna be phoning people to fill in the blanks," promised Carey, who was also wearing a red baseball cap with "Merry Christmas" emblazoned on it.
While he takes satisfaction in filling out the schedule, he takes more in manning a kettle himself.
"I love ringing the bell, to begin with," Carey said, urging folks wishing to volunteer to call the Salvation Army. "If you're busy, it's a lot of fun. ... You get a good feeling out of it. You're helping people."
But Carey also enjoys meeting donors, especially little ones.
"Kids see my pants and they're tugging on Mommy's pants and pointing at mine," he recalled, laughing.
Muncie residents since 1960, he and his wife, Gwen, have two sons, Steve and Matt, and two daughters, Anne Wuthrich and Jane Pohlman, the latter of whom bought her father these precious pants.
That was a number of years ago, though.
What happens when they wear out?
"They're not going to," declared Carey, who has five grandchildren. "I take very good care of these. Dry clean only. And I only wear them at Christmas."
In short, they're both in it for the long haul.
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