The Neighborhood Christmas Tree

For years, my neighborhood has gathered to celebrate the holidays on a Sunday in December. The outdoor event features the lighting of a Christmas tree and a menorah, and a visit from Santa. We’re doing it again this year, though with some notable differences. Rather than sitting on Santa’s lap, the kids will chat with him from their own chair six feet away.

The party is held at a house that sits on a corner lot with a big front yard. There’s a pine tree in that yard that used to serve as our Christmas tree, but it eventually grew so too tall that we would have needed a bucket lift to decorate it. For a few years we pointed one of those holiday light projectors at the tree to illuminate it, but that couldn’t compare with a tree strung with real lights. Last year we went looking for an artificial tree, but found that any tree tall enough would have been hugely expensive.

That’s when my wife Jennifer starting thinking about making our own artificial tree. She talked the plan over with me and other neighbors, and then she and I went to Home Depot to buy materials. When her brother Jeff visited for Thanksgiving last year, the two of them finalized the plan and constructed the tree.

When we took the tree down last January, Jennifer carefully packed up all the components and stored them away. Yesterday we took them out and put the tree up for the second time. The photos below show Jennifer and our neighbor Cathy putting the tree up and placing wrapped boxes underneath it, and the photo above shows the final result.

The “trunk” of the tree is a 10-foot tall piece of 3-inch PVC pipe, painted brown and inserted into a toilet flange bolted to a square piece of plywood that sits on the ground. Twelve guy wires, made of the thin nylon rope used for securing camping tents, run from a cap on top of the pipe down to stakes stuck into the ground in a big circle around the base. Those lines hold the pole in place and also serve as the tree’s framework. We string a couple dozen 50-foot strands of plastic evergreen garland around the outside of the guy-wire canopy, and lay strings of Christmas lights on top of that.

To be honest, it took a lot more plastic garland to cover the tree than we expected, and so the project cost more than we thought it would. But it was still cheaper than buying a pre-made artificial tree, and amortized over several years it will be less expensive than buying a natural tree every year.

This year one of our neighbors, Larry, built a special mailbox in which the neighborhood kids can place their letters to Santa. He did a wonderful job. You can see it to the right of the finished tree in the picture above.