Town is looking festive as Christmas and New Year loom

The Town of Odessa is all decorated for the holidays, following the hard work of town citizens willing to volunteer their time and equipment to the effort. The snowflakes that line the downtown area of First Avenue were put up during the weekend following Thanksgiving by Tom Clavel and his sons, Nick Stewart and Brian Clavel. The snowflakes were refurbished by Chamber of Commerce members last year with new LED lights, and the blue and white light they produce is very eye-catching after the sun goes down. The colors are vivid, and the bulbs are expected to last a long time.

This week Monday, Marlon Schafer and Travis Wagner got the final decorations up when they put lights on the evergreen tree at the Old Town Hall. Schafer’s company Odessa Office Equipment donated the use of a boom truck with buckets for two workers. Wagner and Schafer then took turns stringing the blue and white lights from the top of the tree to the bottom. It makes a nice, coordinated addition to the downtown snowflake decorations.

Many of the downtown businesses also have decorated their windows and/or doorways with signs of the season, so the atmosphere in the town center is quite festive.

The Record learned this week that the Lions Club will not be sponsoring a decorative lighting contest this year. According to a club member, the subject never came up at any of the recent meetings, and so the time has slipped away to organize the contest. That is unfortunate, because several homes with new owners have been decorated with extensive displays this year. For the past several years, a committee has driven around to look at all of the homes with lighted displays. Committee members debated among themselves the pros and cons of the various displays and came up with a ranking of one, two or three to give to each of the top three most artistic designs, with the winners receiving cash prizes in varying amounts based on that ranking. With any luck, the contest will return next year.