It’s pretty easy for Santa Claus to spot the Siepker family compound every holiday season thanks to their unique Christmas tree that floats on big Glen Lake.
“(Santa) always said it helps him find our house,” Frank Siepker III, a fourthgrade student at Glen Lake said.
The Siepker’s sixth-grade daughter, Ashley, enjoys helping put the lights on and going to get the tree together as a family tradition.
Frank Jr., an engineering and operations manager at Cherryland Electric Cooperative, has been putting out the Christmas tree for the past nine years to spread holiday cheer.
“Christmas is a special time of year for us and we love decorations,” Frank Jr. said. “We love driving around at night, looking at the lights and everybody’s house and yards. We don’t have a great yard to decorate where we can share it with others, so we use the lake as our yard.”
Driving down M-22 on the Glen Lake narrows look to your left or right and there will be a Christmas tree bouncing up and down throughout the night that is a sight to see.
With 3,000 lights, the tree lights up the Leelanau-December sky. The light count has grown from 1,500 to 2,000 to 3,000.
“There are three different layers. We take a string of a thousand and layer the whole tree and then we layer another over it to really fit it in,” Frank Jr. said. “Christmas trees naturally don’t have that perfect shape ... There’s branches sticking out everywhere.”
The 12-foot tall Christmas tree sits on a 14-foot aluminum rowboat that Siepker has had since a kid.
“That was my first boat,” he said.
At first, they had an artificial tree, which didn’t work out long. Quickly they turned to a real tree to try and handle the acclimate weather.
One year, when the kids were really small, they placed a plastic Santa Claus instead of the tree.
The process hasn’t gone without its fair share of problems that keeps the Siepker family on their toes.
Once in a blue moon, Frank will get a call from his mother or another person, saying “what happened to the tree?”
Typically, Siepker is always at work when it happens.
“I came home from work and a friend and I put the jet skis in the water and we went looking for it. (The tree) was down there on the shore in a big ice wash,” junior said.
Out of the nine years, the boat has flipped over twice, and caught fire once.
When that happens they start over and don’t give up.
The first priority is getting it floated again. Regardless of how waterproof they make it, the tree doesn’t survive being upside down in the water.
“We stock spare parts and try to always be ready to rebuild because one year it went down before Christmas ... We can’t not have it lit up for Christmas,” Frank Jr. said.
The family has added three solar panels to the tree this year with two big deep-cycle green batteries.
“Since I upgraded this system, one winter I had to bring it in and charge it up a little bit ... December, shortest day of the year, so if it doesn’t come out at all there’s just no time to change,” Frank Jr. said.
The boat lies in about four feet of water on a natural shelf that is enjoyed by many boats in the summer. This makes it easy to throw on some waders, or kayak to fix up the tree if needed.
“We like to keep it out there because it’s prettiest when it’s floating around, but we have to deal with high winds this time of year too,” he said. “We hopefully don’t have to deal with the upside down, floated away, broken, turned over, or smashed Christmas tree boat problems. So if it’s not floating out there, it’s just because it’s been secured for bad weather, so it’ll be back.”
