Around Town
Deck the Firehouse: New Canaan Firefighters Carry On Local Tradition
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Sven Englund, joined out front of the New Canaan Firehouse on this crisp, clear Sunday morning by a half-dozen fellow firefighters, cupped his mouth and called up a ladder leaning against the 1938 structure at Main and Locust. There, Mark Savini was about to affix a loop for hanging a string of white pine roping, wrapped with white Christmas lights, to adorn the firehouse’s façade through the holiday. “Tighter,” Englund, a volunteer firefighter here since 1978, instructed good-naturedly. “It’s going to be too low. Don’t let it drop below the lintel.”
Within a few hours, the guys had looped 375 feet of the roping, bunting-like, along the roofline, hung six red-ribboned wreaths (with another large one out back) and framed in pine needles the four bays and entrance door at the iconic Main Street firehouse—an undisrupted, understood annual tradition of our town on the first Sunday of December that goes back as many generations as the firefighters themselves can remember.