Last holiday appearance for the Black family tree in downtown Joliet

The Black family for years added holiday decorations to the Colorado spruce that was cut down Friday for its final appearance as the city Christmas tree.

“It grew up big. It grew up straight. It was great,” Janet Black said. “One last fling for it.”

“It gets the final decorations this week,” Bill Black said.

The tree will be decorated at its last home in the Van Buren Plaza and will be lit up at the Light Up the Holidays Parade and Festival on Nov. 29. The ceremonial tree lighting is the signal for the parade to start.

This one may be the widest ever donated to the city for its holiday tree.

And it’s no stranger to lights.

There were still some strings of lights found on the tree from Christmases past when it was cut down.

The Blacks haven’t decorated it for years because the tree grew until ladders weren’t high enough for Bill to get lights to the top, and it kept growing.

“It really grew fast,” said Janet, recalling that it was sometime in the 1990s that they stopped lighting the tree.

They moved into the house on Pandola Avenue in 1983, and the tree full of white lights had a nice effect as you turned onto Pandola.

“It was a beautiful tree,” Bill said. “You would turn the corner and see a white tree.”

But the Blacks began to worry about the tree in recent years.

“It was starting to get kind of on its last legs,” Bill said. “It was growing thin, and it was overgrowing the yard.”

The tree is estimated to have been 40 to 50 feet tall when cut down.

“We had to cut it back because of the size of the trunk,” city arborist Jim Teiber said.

It’s now about 35 feet tall.

Teiber did not have a measurement on width, but it is wide.

“It’s probably the widest tree we’ve ever had,” he said.

The tree was cut down and moved with the donated services of D. Ryan Tree & Landscape and Chellino Crane.

Neighbors came to take pictures as the tree was taken down. Teiber brought doughnuts.

“We have a fun time,” Teiber said. “We get good companionship between the workers and everybody. It’s like the start of the holiday season for us.”