With just a week to go until Thanksgiving, Columbus city officials have begun to deck the halls — or, more specifically, city hall.
City crews, along with Frank’s Tree Care, cut down this year’s city hall Christmas tree Monday morning and then set it up downtown. The Colorado Blue Spruce was donated by Dave and Theresa Baldwin of Columbus.
“It’s kind of the nice thing about a small town, that everybody pitches in a little bit,” said Dave Baldwin.
Department of Public Works Director Bryan Burton estimated that the spruce was about 25 feet tall prior to being cut down, though they planned to trim a couple of feet. The tree will be lit on Nov. 23, said city facilities director Mike Pope.
The typical yuletide tradition for the city is that Burton and David Elsbury, the owner of Frank’s Tree Care, are on the lookout all year long for the right tree to grace the plaza of Columbus City Hall. Then, once they’ve found it, the city will ask the owners of the property where the tree is located if they’d be willing to donate the evergreen.
However, in this case, the Baldwins volunteered their tree.
Dave Baldwin said that they moved into their home around 2005 and originally put the Colorado Blue Spruce in their yard as a nod to their previous home state.
“Then it was just sitting there, and it seemed very appropriate to decorate every Christmas,” he said. “So we’d string lights on it, and it’s actually very pretty when it’s dark in the neighborhood, and you can see it glowing up and down the street.”
However, once the tree got to be over 20 feet tall, decking it out became more dangerous. Baldwin tried to donate it to the city in 2022, but they ended up going with a different tree for the annual display.
But of course, if at first you don’t succeed, try again — and this year, the city decided to take the spruce, which Baldwin estimated is about 17 years old.
When asked how it feels to be getting rid of the tree, he said that it’s actually a relief.
“I don’t have the moral quandary of not decorating it or risking my life to decorate it,” he said. “So it would have been a shame to just cut it down. It’s a beautiful tree, but I don’t know. It was so big. It gets harder to mow around. It gets dangerous to decorate. And I just think this is a terrific way for it to go out.”
He added that now that the spruce has made its way to city hall, the family is debating whether to put a different kind of tree, such as a maple, in their yard, or to “start all over again and go get another blue spruce.”
Baldwin said they seem to be leaning towards the latter.
“Who know if we’ll be in the house in 20 more years, but we can go back to decorating it safely,” he said.
