Landmarks: A Christmas tree lot in Richton Park and ‘crazy lights’ in Flossmoor highlight holiday traditions

It was fun early in December to see all of the Krampuses popping up in social media posts and even in analog conversation.

The mean counterpart to Santa Claus, Krampus, of course, is a holiday creature meant to terrorize miscreant children whose naughtiness is undeterred by the prospect of gifted coal.

Like most people I know, I was unaware of Krampus for most of my life. As a child, I have little doubt my parents, if they had known about it, would have made Krampus a prominent resource in their motivational toolbox.

A colorful character whose punishments lie somewhere in between Christmas coal and eternal damnation promised by my grade school nuns, it’s no surprise Krampus has caught on in the last 15 years. Though based in centuries-old European folklore, it qualifies as a new tradition around here.

Holidays are made for traditions, or vice versa, and in many cases the routines, sights and smells we associate with certain times of year are what make a holiday season special.

As a kid in the 1970s, one of the signature outings of Christmastime was going out to get the tree. It was shopping, except better because no actual stores were involved — just a lot filled with a bunch of pine trees. Finding the right one involved a subjective decision even the kids could participate in.

It’s a time-honored tradition for countless suburban families unswayed by the plastic convenience of artificial trees and not adventurous enough to cut one down at a farm.

But it’s a tradition that’s in transition, it seems.

Rick Reinbold, whose family has sold Christmas trees in a lot along Sauk Trail in Richton Park for about 40 years, said a number of factors have taken a toll on roadside tree stands in recent years.

“In our area, I believe we’re the last one,” said Reinbold, who’s been the mayor of Richton Park since 2001. “There used to be one on every other corner. A lot of community organizations had lots — the Jaycees had one for years. Back in the day, our Fire Department used to sell them. There was plenty of business for everyone back then.

“But for those of us still doing it, it’s a family tradition.”

It’s one he has fond memories of going back to his own childhood, when he’d go with his dad to a lot outside Goldblatts in the Park Forest Plaza and buying a Scotch pine for $1.99.

“Live trees are the Christmases of our youth,” he said.

When the family started selling trees themselves, they began creating new holiday traditions.

“My grandfather participated. He was the guy who made the hot cocoa and brought it down — he lived only a block away from the lot,” Reinbold said. “He would come down. My dad worked the lot for a while. My brothers, myself. It was a good experience.”

That experience seemed to extend to customers, too.

“From time to time, young couples will show up with their little ones and say, ‘when I was a little kid, their age,’ referencing their children, ‘we came here to this lot,’” Reinbold said.

“That makes us feel special, that it’s a family tradition that has become generational.”

That holiday ambience was captured by Rick Dunlap, a Park Forest resident who used the lot as a setting for a story that was made into a Hallmark Christmas movie, “Christmas Under the Stars.”

“That came as a surprise to us,” Reinbold said. The trailer on our lot is a little different from the Airstream in the movie. But we’re thrilled to be the inspiration for something that was such a positive.”

The lot on Sauk Trail used to deal strictly in Scotch pines, the most affordable natural tree but also one with sharp needles that can leave memories less warm for those who have been pricked too often.

This year, there are no Scotch pines at the lot, where they’re offering only Frasier fir trees. It’s a tree Reinbold calls “the Cadillac of Christmas trees,” as well as being the priciest and most sought-after. While live tree customers have become more of a niche market, having only fir trees was more a matter of supply than choice, he said.

“In the last five years, I’ve lost two of my providers, who are no longer in the wholesale business for Christmas trees,” he said. “At the last minute, I was able to track down a provider in Indiana that was able to get us trees. I was fortunate to get our inventory this year.”

Reinbold said the labor intensive industry of growing Christmas trees is becoming less profitable as demand shrinks and growers continue to face workforce woes for annual tasks such as shaping the trees with saws for the consumer market.

“One guy used to hire the local high school football team to come out, but he said nobody wants to do it anymore,” Reinbold said. “It’s been a challenge. Guys are getting out of the business.”

But as long as he can find trees to stock his lot, Reinbold said he’ll continue to annually operate along Sauk Trail.

“It’s to the point where I feel an obligation to be there for people who want real Christmas trees, and to have that Christmas tree experience of bringing the kids out. We certainly don’t do the volume we used to, but we have an obligation to the spirit of Christmas to be around. Real trees are real Christmas to us.”

A few miles north, trees are propping up another outdoor holiday tradition. After starting at a single house in Flossmoor in 1999, an outdoor lighting design has grown to encompass whole neighborhoods in the village. And it’s bringing neighbors together at the same time.

“We’ve always called them crazy lights,” said Tyler Thompson, who 24 years ago began decorating the large trees outside of his house in a style that’s since been widely adopted.

Thompson, a landscape designer who works in Homer Glen, said he first saw the concept during a trip to Kansas City, where a neighborhood was decorated in strings of lights stretching from tall treetops to the ground beneath.

“The gist is to make big, swooping Vs, as high as you can,” he said. “The whole goal is to do straight lines from the ground to the trees and back to the ground. You don’t want them to touch another tree or anything that will break the smooth lines. That’s the goal, but every yard is different, every tree is different.”

His decoration style was so different that it inspired strong reactions when he first put up the display on Dartmouth Road in Flossmoor nearly a quarter century ago.

“People loved it and people hated it. Some people came in and tore it down at night. I’d put the back up,” Thompson said. “One guy called it sacrilegious. I can’t really see that, but to each his own. A couple of years later that same guy ended up putting them on his house.”

Other households adopted the look too, and in a few years it became the December aesthetic on Dartmouth, a long, dead-end road nestled between Flossmoor and Idlewild country clubs.

Starting around Thanksgiving, people along the street start gathering on weekends to put the light strings into place. Thompson’s “weapon of choice” is two baseballs bolted together with strings attached, which he hurls into the treetops.

Those community decoration efforts eventually became something more.

“A few years later it became a street event,” he said. “One of those Saturdays we’d just have a huge lunch and the whole street would come down, whether they were helping or not.”

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Thompson brought the concept to his church, Flossmoor Community Church, and it spread from there into the surrounding neighborhood, which also turned the decoration effort into an event.

“They close off the street and have a huge party,” he said. “The sense of how it brings the street together is kind of special.”

More than a decade after the tradition took hold, a new generation of neighbors has grabbed the reins, Thompson said. Instead of lobbing baseballs into the treetops, they use an “air cannon” powered by a portable compressor that shoots weighted plugs with the strings attached. But if you look closely, he said, you can still see lots of baseballs dangling from the trees along Dartmouth, where they’ve gotten hung up over the years.

Each year when the holiday season is through, Thompson wonders if the lights have gone up for the last time on Dartmouth. It takes a lot of effort, generates traffic jams on a quiet, residential street and requires teamwork from lots of neighbors.

“Sometimes I think, do we really want to do it again this year? But then you get them up and are like, OK, that’s why,” he said. “I still get a charge when I turn down Dartmouth. Still, after 24 years.”

Like the Christmas tree lot in Richton Park and even, now, Krampus, it’s become a tradition. And this time of year, traditions mean a lot.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.