New England Asks: Who Has Fairest Lobster Trap Tree of All?

By JESS BIDGOOD

The tiny towns of Beals and Jonesport, Me., have completed their second annual holiday display: a conical tower of 1,364 lobster traps, 60 feet tall, built to withstand the powerful winds that come off the water. It is the towns’ Christmas tree, made of wire traps plucked from the sea by lobstermen who lend them to the cause. “It’s a beautiful structure,” said Dwight Carver, a 57-year-old lobsterman who has lived all his life on the island of Beals, opposite Jonesport on the mainland. Shimmering with thousands of lights and topped with an American flag and a cross made of buoys to honor a fallen fisherman, the lobster trap tree is one of many that materialize this time of year in fishing towns along New England’s northern coast, a descendant of smaller trees that have long adorned lobstermen’s yards and ports. Festive monuments of engineering and local pride, they celebrate the season, affirm the local economy and guarantee bragging rights for the towns. “I think someone did one, and then someone did a bigger one,” said David Cousins, the president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “Which is usually how it goes in the lobster industry. There’s a lot of competition.” When Jonesport joined Beals to make a lobster trap tree on the island for the first time last year — it was 56 feet tall — Joey Ciaramitaro, a blogger from Gloucester, Mass., called it “ridiculously disfigured” and “horribly disproportionate.”

Mr. Ciaramitaro said he preferred his hometown’s tree, which stands about 35 feet, illuminating a plaza in the fishing city’s downtown. Each year, a local arts group invites children to decorate buoys as ornaments, which are auctioned off to raise money for the group. There are 353 on the tree this year. “I think ours has a lot more soul in it than the other trees,” Mr. Ciaramitaro said. “It’s not just a bunch of traps all stacked up.” Gloucester is believed to have started the tradition of the large lobster trap tree when it built its first one in 2001. Janice Lufkin Shea, who was a Gloucester shopkeeper at the time, was frustrated that Main Street had no holiday display. She saw a tiny lobster trap tree in someone’s yard and thought a bigger version would be perfect for downtown. Legend has it that when people in Rockland, Me., learned of it, they decided they had to have one, too. “Well, we’re the lobstering capital of Maine — we should have a trap tree,” said Lorain Francis, the executive director of Rockland Main Street Inc., which has organized the tree construction since the town first built one in 2003. Each year, the town holds a ceremony at which Santa Claus lights the tree with help from the winner of the annual Maine Lobster Festival Sea Goddess pageant. The tree is made from red and green traps custom-built by Stephen Brooks, a third-generation trap maker. They are structurally reinforced, corresponding with a top-secret engineering plan the city uses to build a hollow, free-standing tree, 38 feet tall. “You can put extra bracing in certain areas of the trap to help with the strength,” Mr. Brooks said. But that is about all the detail on the engineering of the tree that an outsider can glean. “It’s a secret that we don’t like to share with everybody,” Ms. Francis said. Howard Mills, a Jonesport selectman known as Buddy, joked about the Rockland tree: “We were going to call them and tell them we’d take their tree for a topping on ours.” Still, he found that the competitive spirit had waned a bit this year — perhaps because the trees in each town have carved their own niches: the biggest, the most complex, the artsiest. And, for communities concerned with fish stocks and lobster prices, each tree is a rallying point. “We like to see everyone have a good time and be happy,” Mr. Mills said. “Not a lot happens in Down East Maine. This is kind of a special thing for us.”