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Show Biggest Christmas trees lined Main Street Every time cities start sprucing up for Christmas, I find myself remembering the giant Colorado blue spruces that ran down the middle of Main Street in my home town of Montpelier, Idaho. Through downtown Montpelier --all --all four blocks of it - Main Street was four lanes wide. But starting at 7th Street, the two inside lanes were replaced by a wide raised divider covered with grass. Each divider was a block long, and each had three or four huge spruce trees down the center. I have no idea how old those trees were. Coming into town on Highway 89 --which --which turned into Main Street - the massive spruce trees were an impressive im-pressive sight, and probably the town's most memorable characteristic. charac-teristic. Highway 89 is a major route to Yellowstone National Park, and it winds through a lot of small towns in the southeastern corner of Idaho. But people remembered Montpelier as the town with the trees down Main Street. They remembered it even more around Christmastime when, in the course of getting ready for the holiday, the town turned all of those spruce trees into Christmas trees, strung with huge colored lights that could be seen for quite a distance. These weren't the delicate lights you find in Provo or on Temple the editor's colum By MARC HADDOCK Square, but large, brightly colored lights. Despite whatever was done in the business district, those gigantic Christmas trees dominated the city's Christmas decorations. Montpelier is cold country, and if the snow falls anywhere, it falls in Bear Lake Valley first. Towards Christmas, snow falls regularly. My earliest Christmas memories are of driving down Main Street in the . evening, everything covered with white and snow still falling. The roads were kept clean by snow plows that piled up excess snow on the dividers and, in the business district, in the middle of Main Street - reducing the four lane road to two lanes. But the ice on the roads always made the trip down Main Street, or any other street, an adventure. ad-venture. When it got dark and cold, the trip was even more interesting. In that odd winter combination of dark skies and white snow, with huge flakes adding to the piles and covering the trees' branches, those massive Christmas lights strung on the spruce trees seemed to give off more of a soft glow than a bright light. I always thought they were the best Christmas trees that could ever be. I would have thought so even more if I had realized that other towns didn't have Christmas trees like that. Those massive trees gave the community character, and the residents of town were proud of them. Small towns need something that makes them stand apart. Some rely on a sense of history or a nearby natural feature to increase community com-munity cohesiveness. Those trees had helped fashion Montpelier's individual character. There was just one problem. They were on a major highway instead of a city street -- and one day someone who had little concern for the town's unique character decided they had to be taken out. Traffic through town was in- creasing, and two lanes down ( Highway 89 were no longer enough. The trees had to be pulled oul so , more cars could come through. Bui every town had cars running down V. the middle of Main Street only ft Montpelier could say the same for v'j its trees. But in our society, progress tends to take precedence over traditions n. that are no longer functional. The --trees --trees served no function other than to separate lanes of traffice and lo look beautiful. The trees and I left town about Ine same time. I was 19, and tta) ; started tearing them from l i ground the day before I headed out , for a two-year visit to Mexico. j I remember walking down w j street, looking at the massive re ; with the dark dirt hanging fro them and the earth piled up w the ground has been disrupted violently. It's the last clear vision' have of home. . By the time. I got back. Ma , Street was smoothly paved wi tt j awkward four-lane highway thai) j will find in any of a thousand mm towns intersected by major rw and Montpelier wasn t anymore. ,.n Time and circumstances haa ioi. out my roots as well. ,, ! ' But every Christmas 1 find retaking re-taking that mental journey , C again. L i |