Blue Spruce is Up on Waverly Place; Now the Season Can Begin

In Madison, the holidays start with the arrival of a fresh pine tree cut down by the guys from the Madison Electric Co. from a local home, transported to Waverly Place on a Coviello’s Nursery big red flat bed truck and lowered into a utility hole.

                        
It’s a ritual as sure as the Christmas Parade that follows on Thanksgiving Friday and anticipated as much by grownups as it is by the kids who wait for Santa to flip the switch and light the tree at the end of the parade.

This year, a blue spruce donated by Cross Gates Road residents Eugene and Joanne Sylva was a welcome sight on Main Street under the cloudiest of skies and amid the raw chill of a November morning, Friday, Nov. 17.

 Chris Engel, a Chatham Borough resident who happened to be on Place, saw the tree and flipped out his smart phone to take a photo  as it still lay on the truck.

“I’m going to send it to my kids in college,” he said. When they were little, the Engels used to come into town for the parade and more surprisingly, “we still go  Santa’s Village,” a Christmas display set up at the Madison train station.

Mara Johnson, branch manager for on Main Street and Deborah Farrar Starker, president of the Madison Arts Cultural Alliance, both happened on the same street corner to snap the photo, too. Johnson said she would send the photo on to the Sylvas; Starker was going to send it to her daughter, Remy, away at college.

“The beginning of the season is this tree,” said Johnson while Starker said it was “like Rockefeller Center!”

Putting on the lights takes Friday and into Saturday to accomplish, said James Mattina, Madison Electric Co., foreman.

“They’ll be out there all day,” said Anne Kennedy, owner of the Madison as she cut a client’s hair and watched from her storefront window on Waverly. “I’ve been watching this for 15 years.“