Northwest Philadelphia’s holiday season is now in full swing – bringing a giant Christmas tree to Germantown Avenue as well as a parade featuring Santa.

With Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday in the rearview mirror, neighbors were ready to start celebrating the Christmas season last weekend. 

On Saturday, Chestnut Hill’s annual holiday parade went off without a hitch, bringing mounted horses, dancers and the Philly Phanatic out to march alongside – of course – Santa. 

Two more stalwarts of our neighborhood holidays took their place as annual markers of the season throughout that week. The soaring Christmas tree that towers above J. McLaughlin at Germantown Avenue and Gravers Lane went up, and Bredenbeck’s Bakery got busy with everything gingerbread.

The tree, now standing on the second-story property of Richard Snowden, longtime Chestnut Hill resident and real estate developer, is a tradition that is 10 years old this Christmas. 

This year’s Concolor Fir stands 26 feet tall, the same as last year, but it is a fuller and more robust tree than last year’s version. It was transported by truck from a Chester County farm, lifted to Snowden’s second-story patio via crane, and then erected and decorated with white lights and red bows by a team led by Eric Graber, of Snowden’s Bowman Properties.

Meanwhile, further down the Avenue, the warm aroma of gingerbread wafting out of Bredenbeck’s is a sign that,  yes, ‘tis the season. 

The bakery’s 10,800-square-foot warehouse in Wyndmoor is headquarters for the culinary magic that mixes, cuts and bakes the gingerbread used to create the bakery’s houses, people and other cookies. 

And since last year, it’s also been enlisted to make the life-sized gingerbread cabin that’s big enough to walk through. The 10-foot tall, 18-foot wide and 7-foot deep gingerbread house is already set up inside the Wells Fargo Center in South Philadelphia, where sports fans can walk through and snap a photo.

Bredenbeck’s owners Jake and Irv Boyd, have marshaled a staff of bakers and decorators, led by head sugar artist Diana Anello, who have created not only the Wells Fargo house but a replica of the children’s garden at Winterthur Museum in Delaware in gingerbread.

But it is in South Philly where the gingerbread house proved irresistible - at least, to one person.

“When we took down last year’s house,” Anello said, “there were lick marks on the walls.”