This year’s Millennium Park Christmas tree is a 67-foot-tall Norway spruce from Glenview

Right now the tree that will soon rise from Millennium Park smothered in thousands of lights looks like a giant version of something you might use to scrub the gunk from a shower drain.

But behold that 67-foot-tall Norway spruce in winter, its broad branches unbound and dusted in snow — and you can see why the city picked it for this year’s official Christmas tree.

The towering spruce belongs to Ryan and Jody Mason and sits in front of the Glenview home they’ve owned for the past 10 years. Its branches are all tied in place in preparation for the big move today.

“Unfortunately, it was time for the tree to go,” Jody Mason told the Chicago Sun-Times. “You can’t see our house right now because the tree has become so large. … It’s very close to the house and we’re getting ready to do some work on the house.”

The folks at the city who are responsible for picking the tree said they were impressed, among other things, by the tree’s size.

“We couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this,” said Neil Heitz, director of production at the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events “This year’s tree is bigger than many of the trees that we had in the past. We’re thrilled to continue building on a Chicago tradition that brings so many people together.”

The Masons say the home’s former owner planted the tree, then a one-foot-tall sapling, in the early 1980s; the tree came from Ohio.

About 10 years later, the homeowner planted another tree beside the Norway spruce — a pine tree that came with a McDonald’s Happy Meal. It was McDonald’s response to then-President H. W. Bush’s 1990 State of the Union address in which he called for the planting of a billion trees annually “to keep America beautiful for generations to come.”

The Masons chopped down the McDonald’s tree when they moved into the house in 2016 because, they said, it was so big that they couldn’t see the house.

Every year, they have decorated the remaining tree with Christmas lights.

“As much as I could,” Ryan Mason said. “I had 1,000 lights, and they barely wrapped around [the bottom] branches. Beyond that, I projected laser lights on it because I didn’t think I could get [the lights] any higher than that.”

In a sense, the Norway spruce will survive even after it is chopped down and hauled to Millennium Park.

Jody Mason’s father lives in Indiana and, as a hobby, has his own tree farm.

“We are collecting bags of pine cones for him and we are going to make sure to replant a lot of the seeds from this tree so that it will live on [in Indiana],” Jody Mason said.

In the meantime, the Masons — including their children, Evelyn, 11, and Lucas, 8 — are getting ready for the tree lighting at 6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 21 in Millennium Park near the intersection of Washington and Michigan.

“We’re all sad to see the tree go, but it was going to have to go anyway. It’s quite a fitting sendoff,” Jody Mason said.