If you've lived in Arizona for a while, you've probably heard about a roadside holiday tradition that went on — secretly — for decades.
Every year starting in 1989, a juniper tree on Interstate 17 near mile post 254, between Sunset Point and Cordes Junction, was decorated for Christmas right around Thanksgiving. It wasn’t a tourist stop — it was in the middle of the median, so you could only see it while driving by.
It became lovingly known as the I-17 Mystery Tree. The Arizona Department of Transportation shared photos when it was all decked out. The popular travel website Atlas Obscura wrote about it.
For decades, the shiny tinsel and ornaments would come and go each holiday season. For a long time, no one — including ADOT — knew who was doing it.
Drivers hoping to catch a glimpse of the tree this year are out of luck — it fell prey to fire in 2019 and hasn't been decorated since. ADOT said in 2016 it had survived fires in the area for years.
In 2021, the family behind the tradition finally revealed themselves.
“So a long time ago, my mom, Nancy Dittbrenner Loftis, decided she wanted to decorate a tree because she thought it would be something nice to do because we would see it, the family members would see it, and everybody would see it. It would just be a nice holiday type of thing to decorate," Todd Dittbrenner, Nancy’s son, told KJZZ News.
Nancy Dittbrenner Loftis began the tradition in the late 1980s as a way to bring together three generations of family and friends, all of whom gathered to help, according to Todd Dittbrenner.
Now, Todd Dittbrenner says there’s a possibility of some sort of holiday cheer in the future.
“There’s thoughts of building some kind of a tree,” he said, suggesting it would be a uniform, human-made structure. “Maybe possibly do a monument or something like that out of metal, and that way it wouldn’t burn.”
Todd Dittbrenner isn’t the only one with ideas about bringing back the tree.
Dolan Ellis is Arizona’s official balladeer. In 2019, the Arizona Department of Transportation posted a song Ellis wrote about the tree. Ellis even named it.
“I just felt it needed a name so I gave it the name Scrubby, and then I thought that it needed a song. And so I wrote a song about it and put it out there and people seemed to like it."
Ellis hopes someone will plant a new Scrubby and keep the tradition going. Like Todd Dittbrenner, he’s got some ideas.
“I’d love to see some organization, maybe a bank, maybe, I don’t know, Salt River Project, APS, somebody that serves the public and touches the public with their lives and with their product and it wouldn’t really cost that much to plant a new tree and have a Scrubby again.”
For this year, at least, we’ve still got Ellis’ song.
