Christmas crane lights up downtown Saskatoon

When looking across the South Saskatchewan river towards downtown Saskatoon, there is a crane donned with Christmas lights that stands out among the cityscape.

It is part of a competition that Ledcor and Pagnotta put on each year to see which of their construction sites across Canada can have the best decorated crane.

“We have a few people get all safetied up, harnesses and all their protection and they climb around there and with cable ties secure the lights back and forth all the way down the end of the jib back down the counter jib up the apex and all that. We tried to make it look like a Christmas tree,” said vice-president of Pagnotta, Joe Caudle.

“I don’t know if we have the best but we try to decorate as good as possible and just enjoy the holidays.”

He said they like to participate every year but sometimes the weather doesn’t agree with them.

“We didn’t get to do it last year, we got the Christmas lights too late and it got too cold. When it’s really cold we don’t like to get out there when it’s minus 50 with the wind chill up top but that weekend it was plus 10 out it was perfect weather,” said Caudle.

“We’re going to leave it like that. What we did was we took the rest of the lights and we went all around second floor’s perimeter. We kind of lost our steam there when the weather got cold, so we are going to give up this year but there is always next year.”

According to Caudle, there is over 1000 feet of lights strung up around the crane.