(Picture: Pete Tobit)

Someone has brazenly flouted the spirit of Christmas.

Vandals chopped down a Christmas tree in Rochford, Essex, on the eve of its lights being switched on.

After it was felled in the early hours of Sunday morning, council chairman Heather Glynn appealed for help online.

Pretty amazingly, local people came to the rescue – and by 10am the tree was back upright and the lights were restored.


‘Thanks to an amazing community spirit, and acts of kindness from some truly wonderful people, the tree is back up,’ Glynn told the BBC.

‘Fortunately the lighting event was not until the afternoon and people were determined not to let the vandals beat them.’



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‘It was an act of mindless vandalism. Nothing stolen, just cut down,’ Pete Tobit, the organiser of the lights festival, said.

‘Thankfully, there are quite a few community spirited people in Rochford who just turned up and offered their services to reinstate the tree and lights.

‘It certainly has restored my faith in community spirit.’

Now, we do have to be cautious, but we think we know who the culprit is…