Eagle announces Christmas Decoration Contest winners
Winners of this year's Butler Eagle Facebook Christmas Decoration Contest were a pretty diverse lot, ranging from a Christmas tree celebrating military service to the biggest toy tractor a four-year-old ever received to a light display complete with its own FM radio soundtrack.
Wyatt McCall's decorated tractor finished second with 82 “likes.”
It's a pretty cool tractor, four-year-old Wyatt would agree. He loved to sit on it for hours when it sat derelict in the woods near his great-uncle Ray Christy's property.
Wyatt's mother, Megan McCall, said Christy gave her son the FarmAll H-model tractor.
Wyatt's dad, Chad McCall, brought the tractor to their home at 230 Byers Road in West Sunbury where he got the tractor running again.
“We decided to decorate it for Christmas. It's right in our front yard,” she said.
It's a tradition she thinks the family will keep going, at least until Wyatt becomes old enough to actually drive it.
“People seem to like it, ”she said, adding it's a strange tradition to start because “we're not farmers.”
Michelle McCracken's Navy Christmas tree placed first among the Butler Eagle's Facebook audience with 88 “like reactions.”The Slippery Rock woman said her tree, festooned in submarines, dog tags and other military paraphernalia, is meant as a tribute to her husband, Jacob, and her son, Jonathan. Jacob McCracken spent nine years as a U.S. Navy submariner, while Jonathan served on active duty in the Army from 2013 to 2018 and now as an Army reservist.McCracken says her tree contains silhouettes of the submarines USS Trepang and USS Miami, two vessels that Jacob McCracken served on. Both submarines have been decommissioned.“Between the two submarines is an ornament showing the Ledge Lighthouse House in Connecticut,” McCracken said, adding “It looks like a house. It's very important to me. When my husband's submarines came back from sea, they passed the lighthouse.”Also on the tree is a picture of her granddaughter, Clara, 2. It could be that she will continue in the military tradition that runs in her family.McCracken said, “Besides my husband and son, my family has a huge military tree.“My father was in the Army, my brothers were in the Navy. There's a generation of cousins in the military.”
Tyler Huth's not a concert lighting technician either but that didn't stop him from adding another 7,000 lights and a Santa-hatted dinosaur this year to the Christmas light display around his house in Buffalo Township.His light display, which finished third with 72 votes, contains many refurbished old Christmas decorations that Huth has been buying off Craigslist and Facebook and close to 40,000 lights all synchronized to flash on and off to his private music track broadcast to passing cars' FM radio.Using software and a controller, he can broadcast a 10-minute music track made up of music from Trans-Siberian Orchestra and David Foster songs to passing car radios tuned to 88.1 FM.
