:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/adn/OKTEZ5SQXRAGTBOPGZGGP6KNS4.JPG?ssl=1 "The Glenn Highway Christmas tree, an Alaska roadside icon, will keep shining")
PALMER — Every year, Jason Tolstrup flipped the switch on the holiday lights adorning the massive steel Christmas tree along the Glenn Highway as soon as he finished Thanksgiving dinner.
That tradition ended this year. Tolstrup, a 53-year-old longshoreman from Wasilla who became the self-appointed guardian of the Glenn Highway Christmas tree nearly two decades ago, died in a dirt biking crash in April.
It will be Dustin, Tolstrup’s twin brother, lighting the tree on Thursday, with a small group of family and close friends, including Jason’s wife, Kaye, and the four daughters they shared. They will hang ornaments bearing Jason Tolstrup’s photo. Some of his ashes are already hung on the tree.
“When I’m there, I feel closer to Jason,” Kaye Tolstrup said this week, looking ahead to Thursday. “It’s definitely going to be emotionally different and difficult. It’s his tree. It was his pride and joy. He loved to make the public happy. That was all he ever wanted.”
The tree, a roughly 20-foot-tall cone of steel rebar strung with thousands of lights and topped with a star, shines through the winter darkness, ice fog and frigid weather that tends to accompany the drive for tens of thousands of Mat-Su drivers who make the trip to and from Anchorage.
It stays lit from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, rising from a frozen swamp near the Old Glenn Highway overpass just south of the Palmer Hay Flats State Game Refuge.
Kaye Tolstrup said Jason “years and years ago” asked his brother to keep the tree going if anything happened to him.
So Dustin Tolstrup will carry on the family tradition of making sure the tree stays lit with a 6-battery rotation that ensures there are always two working batteries and two charging, along with the two sapped after powering the lights for anywhere from one to three days.
Tolstrup, who for years helped his brother lug batteries, said it was a no-brainer to step in now.
“My brother did it for the people,” he said this week. “I’m doing it for my brother.”
The tree has its own Facebook group, established in 2019, that this week hit 13,000 members from around the world, with followers from countries as far away as Afghanistan. The tree is an Alaska icon, as one fan put it, that’s “come a long way from the scraggly spruce tree that mysteriously lit up year after year around Christmas.”
For years, Jason Tolstrup was the mystery man behind the tree.
He kept his identity secret after he took over from the former treekeeper in 2005. In 2019, when the real tree gave way to the elements, Tolstrup installed the roughly 20-foot-tall metal version in place now. He hauled batteries back and forth, sometimes daily, risking injury and wrapping in the whole family to help.
The twin brothers were on a road trip through Nevada in April when Jason’s fatal crash occurred. Dustin Tolstrup said someone, probably one of the dozen emergency responders who watched him lose his twin brother that day, put balloons at the site of the crash.
Seeing those balloons on a visit to the spot later was a gut punch, he said — but also one of those unexpected gifts that made him realize “how amazing people are.”
Dustin Tolstrup said it’s not hard going out to the tree. He’s seen it out there for decades. What’s hard is going to work at the port in Anchorage where he and his brother loaded cargo together, side by side on cranes, competing to see who was faster. His birthday will be hard. It will be the first in his life he celebrates alone.
Dustin and Kaye Tolstrup trudged out to the tree Monday to test the 800 feet of lights strung on its conical steel frame. The honking started as soon as the lights sprang to life, Kaye Tolstrup said this week.
There’s something about the sight of those red, yellow, purple, green and blue LED lights blazing from the winter landscape that warms your heart, she said.
Kaye, 45 and a PIC at Three Bears, was with Jason for 10 years.
Before that, she was one of those drivers headed back to Mat-Su who appreciated the simple joy of a Christmas tree suddenly appearing in the pitch-black expanse along the highway.
“The first time I remember driving from Anchorage and seeing that tree, it makes you feel like … ‘Oh, I’m home now,’” she said. “It makes you happy. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s completely dark and it’s cold. Then you see this tree and it’s just like, everything is good.”
