Lake Knowles tree tradition brings Winter Park neighborhood together

Everyone has holiday traditions. Whether it’s where you place a Christmas tree or how you string the lights, small habits and rituals are part of what makes the holidays special.

But one Winter Park neighborhood surrounding Lake Knowles has shared a tradition with the community for over 50 years. It’s a tradition that sits on the body of water and glows at night with a display of multicolored lights for everyone to see — and it all started with a local garden club.

The 10-foot Christmas tree that sits at the center of Lake Knowles dates as far back as 1965, when the Red Pepper Garden Club first started placing it there each year. Back then, the tree was decorated with the circular lids of tin cans and strung with garland and large, old-fashioned Christmas lights.

Winter Park resident David Cavalere remembers it well — he grew up right beside the lake and always watched the club set up the tree.

“I was just a little kid, and I’d be climbing in the tree watching them,” Cavalere said. “It was amazing to watch them do it.”

Around 1975, the tree tradition was passed on from the garden club to the neighborhood that surrounded the lake. Cavalere and his brother, Michael, became the unofficial keepers of the tree, leading the neighborhood effort each year to set it up ever since. 

Michael eventually moved away, but Cavalere always has relied on a neighborhood effort to keep the tradition going.

“We got more of the neighbors involved, and now it’s kind of a neighborhood group thing,” Cavalere said. “We’ll either do it the first week of December or Thanksgiving weekend.”

The process of placing the tree is certainly a team effort. The tree is decorated and placed on a wooden raft/platform, which weighs between 400 and 500 pounds altogether.

The raft is attached to empty plastic barrels and floated out to the center of the lake, where it is attached to a 300- to 400-pound concrete anchor at the bottom.

The tree is powered using an underground power line at the bottom of the lake — the city of Winter Park has powered the tree since the tradition first began in the 1960s.

Local residents can’t help but slow down while driving past to observe the floating Christmas tree, taking photos and admiring it from the shoreline.

The Lake Knowles neighbors usually gather for a holiday party once the tree is up as well. The whole experience is something that brings the neighbors together, next-door neighbor Leslie Flaherty said.

“Everybody enjoys it so much, I think even people that don’t live right here — there’s so many people that pass by Lakemont,” she said. “I think it just creates a magical feeling when you drive past in the evening. It helps neighbors to get to know each other. … It gives a reason to come together.”

The tradition has changed and evolved over the years. The husbands of the wives that made up the Red Pepper garden club originally used a live tree — and that continued the following 37 years. Issues continued to arise though with how top-heavy the tree was and the cost of purchasing the tree each year, so about 15 years ago, the community opted for an artificial tree, which is much easier to place on the raft and is less likely to tip over.

“We had some adventures — when you had a live tree,  it was very heavy,” Cavalere said. “One year the storms were real bad, and the thing flipped over. We’ve had other disasters along the way just trying to keep it straight. That’s the thing with the lighter artificial tree — it’s so much easier.

“It actually looks more perfect,” he said. “Each year (with a live tree), you never knew how the tree was going to look and you had to buy a new tree.”

Cavalere hopes to one day pass on the responsibility of keeping the tradition alive to another neighbor. Giving Winter Park something to enjoy every Christmas has been a special tradition — one that he hopes will continue for years to come, he said.

“Some years, the weather is not good or something and you think, ‘It’s going to be kind of a pain to do it this year,’” Cavalere said. “But then when you start doing it, and you see people’s reactions, it always brings joy to you. It really does.”