The season begins Lowe's decks out Christmas tree at Neppel Landing
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Lowe’s employee Tyrel Parrott makes a valiant first attempt to string lights on the big spruce in Neppel Landing on Wednesday.
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Lowe’s employees Ashley Castro, Jeremy Winn, and Charlie Wood tape Christmas tree lights as they prepare their first attempt to deck the tree.
MOSES LAKE — First, they had to figure out if the power worked.
Jeremy Winn, manager of Lowe’s Home Improvement Center in Moses Lake, poked through the low branches of the spruce in the northeast corner of Neppel Landing to find the power outlets.
Winn plugged a box of Christmas tree lights into each plug, one at a time. They lit up, each time.
“Are you hanging ornaments? Because I have ornaments,” asked Roland Gonzales, head of maintenance for the Moses Lake Parks Department.
Winn thought for a moment.
“Let’s get the lights up first,” he said.
Winn, along with a gaggle of Lowe’s employees, gathered in the brisk morning air at Neppel Landing on Wednesday to deck out the city’s public Christmas tree. They brought with them 2,000 feet of Christmas lights, several rolls of all-weather duct tape, a ten-foot length of flexible plastic pipe, a rented cherry picker, and the hope they could get all these lights hung in three hours.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
Deciding it would have required too much time and work to wrap the tree with Christmas lights, the plan was to hang the ten-foot ring made of plastic pipe around the top of the tree, and then dangle long strings of lights down from that ring. It took about an hour for the volunteers to unbox the lights, stretch them out, tape them together, and then tape them all to the ten-foot ring.
However, as Tyrel Parrott raised himself up in the cherry picker, he realized the tree was taller than they’d been told and their ten-foot plastic ring wasn’t big enough.
“The tree is bigger than anticipated. We were told 35 feet but this is at least 50, so we’re creating a much larger ring, 40 feet, not the ten feet we started with,” Winn said.
Slowly, the crane brought Parrott and the strings of light down. Lowe’s employees pulled the strands of light off, and then spread them out and taped them to four new pipe sections.
There was confidence. This was going to work.
“All right, guys, we got this,” said Lowe’s employee Charlie Wood as she held a bundle of lights. “I’ve got a feeling this is going to work.”
And, slowly, it did. As pipe sections rose and Parrott used brass plumbing fittings to hook them together, other Lowe’s employees started tying down dangling lines of Christmas tree lights and plugging them into extension cords.
“Lowe’s is a spectacular store that involves itself in community programs,” said Jasmyne DeBeaumont, director of the Moses Lake Business Association. “This is their second project with the city. The first was with the dog park, Lowe’s assisted with materials and labor to install the soil.”
“It was a fantastic project! The community loves that dog park!” DeBeaumont added.