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Rockefeller Center just got its annual jolt of holiday spirit, and several tons of Norway spruce, thanks to the arrival of this year’s Christmas tree, freshly hauled in from East Greenbush, New York. The 75-foot titan rolled into midtown on Saturday after a one-and-a-half-day journey that involved a flatbed truck, a police escort and precision road-choreography that’s normally reserved for popes and presidents.
If you caught the installation footage, you saw the full spectacle: cranes hoisting the wrapped tree horizontally over Center Plaza, crews guiding its 11-ton trunk onto a steel spike and the spruce slowly rising into place as the crowd cheered. It’s the city’s favorite early-November ritual: part engineering feat, part civic pep rally and fully unbothered by the fact that it is, technically, still fall.
This year’s tree comes courtesy of the Russ family, who donated the spruce after it spent six decades towering over their East Greenbush property. It stands about 75 feet tall and 45 feet in diameter, a classic Rockefeller silhouette. Before its big debut, the tree spent months being watered, fed, measured, climbed and gently cajoled by head gardener Erik Pauze, who’s spent more than 30 years scouting potential holiday icons. (He’s been known to knock on doors to pitch homeowners on letting their trees go—and, yes, sometimes a crane has to air-lift the chosen spruce over a house.)
Over the next few weeks, the tree will get its signature glow-up: more than 50,000 multicolored, energy-efficient LEDs (that’s five miles of wiring) and a nine-foot Swarovski star loaded with three million crystals and weighing approximately 900 pounds. The lights are new each year, but the star and the plaza’s angels go into climate-controlled hibernation between seasons.
The official lighting happens on Wednesday, December 3, during the “Christmas in Rockefeller Center” broadcast on NBC and Peacock. After that, the tree will shine daily from 5am to midnight—except on Christmas, when it stays lit for 24 hours straight.
When the season winds down in mid-January, the spruce will get one final assignment: it’ll be milled into lumber for Habitat for Humanity, continuing a tradition that turns New York’s most famous tree into someone’s future home.
Until then? Bundle up, embrace the crowds and enjoy the glow. Rockefeller season has begun!