Icy tradition knows no thaw
Even amid pandemic, family crafts massive tree sculpture, with roots dating to 1960s
The warm front that will settle across the Lehigh Valley this week likely means the end of a record snow season, and, on Memorial Drive in Heidelberg Township, of a heaping 25-foottall ice sculpture resembling a tall tree and an impenetrable cumulus cloud.
The ice tree, crafted by a man who does fire restoration for a living, is one fourth-generation family tradition that the coronavirus pandemic could not disrupt.
“With everything going on in the world ... It’s one thing that is a stupid, fun thing,” said its creator, T.J. Stellar. “It’s sticks and water, mixed together at the right temperature.”
Each year between Christmas and New Year’s, with the
help of his brother, father and a few neighbors, Stellar fashions the base structure by making a teepee from a couple of large trees, adding branches and brush, then spraying water until it freezes in a drippy, cascading pattern. The water, supplied through hoses attached to poles standing on ladders, runs all winter, night and day.
Sometimes Stellar, who works for his father’s construction company, has to go out at 2 a.m. to change the position of the hoses as the wind shifts. Shadow, his dog, keeps him company. His wife, Kelsey, handles the Facebook page they created for the phenomenon a few years ago. Stellar jokes he is the artist.
“I can barely draw stick figures,” he said.
The technique has been honed for generations. In the 1960s, his great-grandfather, Victor William Fox, started the tradition in protest when his town of Union, New Jersey, started charging a flat annual fee for water. Fox, a taxpayer, figured he would use all the water he could for his money.
The tradition passed on through marriage to the Stellar family. When T.J. was growing up, his uncle in New Jersey and T.J.’s father competed for the tallest ice tree in the house where Stellar lives now.
Stellar, 35, took over around 2010, after he graduated college. It’s no longer a protest — they have well water — but it’s still a neighborhood spectacle. Strangers regularly stop by to take pictures, sometimes with their elderly parents, for whom COVID-safe activities are tough to find.
The tradition follows its elemental opposite; about every two years in the fall, since Stellar was a child, his family has built massive bonfires in the yard. The last one Stellar built, two years ago, was 52 feet tall — about twice the height of this year’s ice tree.
Not every year is a success.
Last year, during an unusually warm winter, he had to rebuild the structure three times.
His record year was in 2014, when he built it up to 57 feet.
Though this year’s record-breaking snowstorm did a number on the Valley, it made little dent on the ice tree, he said. All snow really does is pack in empty spaces.
The key ingredients are cold and wind, which helps move the water around so it doesn’t concentrate in one spot.
“I’m probably the only person that gets excited when the weather forecast says 10 degrees and freezing rain,” he said. “It gives me something to look forward to when everyone else is cringing.”
This year’s yield was about normal, in a year when nothing else was. Stellar’s already started training his niece to take over one day.