Crew Installs Downtown Christmas Tree

Release Date: November 22,2016

Crew installs annual downtown Santa Barbara Christmas tree

Tree sits at 50 feet tall

Crane installing the Santa Barbara annual Christmas tree in front of the Arlington Theater. (Joyce Roberson / KEYT photo)

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - The holiday season in Santa Barbara is just that much closer to officially starting with the arrival of the downtown Christmas tree.

It is a 50 foot tall Douglas Fir trucked down from an area near Shaver Lake (Fresno County) operated by Southern California Edison. SCE provided the tree and Goleta based Consumer Fire Products Inc. funded the transportation to Santa Barbara and serves as the main sponsor of the upcoming holiday parade.

This year's theme for the 64th annual Holiday parade on December 2nd is "Holiday Under the Sea." Over 90 entries will take part in the eventon State Street, including community floats, large inflatable character balloons and marching bands. The parade begins at State and Sola and continues down the street to Cota. A crowd of about 50,000 is expected.

The tree will be lit up at the start of the parade.

This morning Santa Barbara City Public Works and Forestry crew members worked with Bragg cranes to install the tree into a metal sleeve at State and Victoria street.

Afterwards long strings of LED lights were hung on all sides. The tedious task took several hours and several pieces of equipment. The low energy use lights first replaced the well used older lights, last year.

For more information on the downtown organization or parade go to: https://www.downtownsb.org/