How the evergreen shaped America
In his upcoming book, “Evergreen: The Trees That Shaped America,” Trent Preszler delves into the profound cultural significance of evergreens in American life, particularly through the lens of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. This annual spectacle, which draws millions of visitors and viewers alike, symbolizes more than just holiday cheer; it embodies resilience and hope, rooted in its humble beginnings during the Great Depression. In 1931, construction workers at Rockefeller Center pooled their meager resources to purchase a modest balsam fir, decorating it with handmade garlands and salvaged materials. This act of unity and creativity amidst adversity transformed the tree into a living altar, a beacon of hope that has since evolved into a national tradition.
Today, the spectacle surrounding the Rockefeller Center tree is a massive production, meticulously curated by Erik Pauze, the head gardener who has dedicated over three decades to finding the perfect evergreen. His quest takes him across the Northeast, where he scouts for trees with the right “personality,” ensuring they can withstand the rigors of the journey to Manhattan. The tree’s transportation is a carefully orchestrated event, complete with police escorts and live broadcasts, culminating in a lighting ceremony that attracts hundreds of thousands in person and millions more via television. Yet, amid the glitz and glamour, Preszler highlights the underlying tensions of this tradition, where the commercialization of Christmas often overshadows its deeper meanings of faith and community.
As the holiday season concludes, the once-celebrated tree faces a fate that starkly contrasts its moment of glory. After serving its purpose as a symbol of festivity, it is typically dismantled, with its wood repurposed for charitable projects. This cycle of life and death encapsulates the bittersweet nature of the holiday season, reflecting both the joy of celebration and the melancholy of impermanence. Preszler’s exploration of evergreens prompts readers to appreciate these seasonal markers as more than mere decorations; they are poignant reminders of our own transient existence, urging us to savor the beauty of the moment while it lasts.
Excerpted from
Evergreen: The Trees That Shaped America
by Trent Preszler, copyright © 2025 by Trent Preszler. Used with permission of Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
A Living Altar
Imagine for a moment if visitors from another planet observed humans buying, selling, and decorating billions of trees every year. They might reasonably mistake us for members of a global evergreen cult. If these extraterrestrials watched as trees vanished abruptly from forests around the world, only to reappear overnight, shimmering in living rooms and shop windows, they would marvel at humanity’s arboreal obsession and the sheer devotion required to sustain it. To their alien eyes, every house framed in fir, every ship’s mast carved from pine, every page bound into books, and every log burned to ash might appear as offerings to ancient gods. And if, through countless glittering bulbs illuminating these trees, they glimpsed New York City’s Rockefeller Center at Christmastime, they would surely believe they had discovered the holiest shrine of an evergreen-worshipping civilization.
Every year just after Thanksgiving, millions of Americans turn their gaze toward a single tree: an evergreen carried like a fallen giant on a flatbed truck through the streets of Manhattan. Crowds gather to watch workers climb its trunk and expertly thread fifty thousand lights through limbs that once knew only wind and snow. Then, on a cold Wednesday evening, in a ritual as predictable as a moonrise, someone flips a switch. The tree blazes to life, casting a sudden, surreal daylight across Fifth Avenue. For a few moments, it eclipses phones, emails, deadlines, everything, and commands the attention of an entire nation.
But this glitzy tradition had humble roots. In 1931, America sinking deeper into the Great Depression, with unemployment nearing 25 percent. Construction workers laboring over Rockefeller Center’s emerging art deco skyscrapers battled fierce winds and bitter cold, their futures as uncertain as their paychecks. Desperate for a hint of joy, they pooled what little money they had to buy an unassuming twenty-foot balsam fir, decorating it humbly with handmade garlands, strings of cranberries, and empty tin cans salvaged from lunch boxes. Set against scaffolding and steel girders, the tree stood not as a spectacle, but a symbol of resilience. Far beyond mere decoration, it was a living altar to hope.
Two years later, that private gesture blossomed into a public ritual when Rockefeller Center erected its first official Christmas tree, this one adorned with hundreds of electric lights. Over subsequent decades, the tree grew steadily taller, brighter, and more elaborate, until it became as essential to the American Christmas as Santa Claus himself.
The 1955 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. The tree was decorated some 2,500 bulbs and 1,400 globes: red, white, blue and yellow.
Image:
Bettmann
/ Contributor via Getty Images
Today, few people feel the holiday season’s pressure more acutely than Erik Pauze, Rockefeller Center’s head gardener, who shoulders the responsibility of selecting America’s most famous evergreen to tower above the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza. A soft-spoken horticulturist with meticulous instincts and an ever-present safety helmet, Pauze notices details others overlook: the subtle droop of a branch, the shade of green signaling hidden drought stress. He has spent more than thirty years scouring backyards, small-town parks, and forgotten farmsteads across the Northeast in search of perfection. He drives thousands of miles annually, often following tips scribbled onto napkins or whispered by locals in roadside diners. The ideal tree, he says, must have “personality”—an intangible dignity that commands attention amid Manhattan’s steel and glass skyline.
Homeowners sometimes submit candidates, hoping their tree will achieve brief immortality, but Pauze often discovers promising evergreens himself while roaming backcountry roads, keeping a mental tally of future contenders.
“I found the tree in Vestal, New York, when I was on my way to look at another tree, not too far away,” he told the
New York Post
in 2023. Springtime gossip had already tipped him off. Locals were whispering that the tree was Rockefeller-worthy. When he knocks on a door, “Sometimes they believe me right away,” Pauze said. “And sometimes it’s like ‘Nah, no way. You’re not the guy from Rockefeller Center.’”
Finding the tree is just the beginning. Pauze’s crew climbs into its canopy to inspect the structural integrity of each limb, ensuring that the tree can safely support the nine-hundred-pound Swarovski crystal star destined for its spire. For months leading to the tree’s late November debut, the crew monitors its water intake and plots every detail of its harrowing journey into New York City.
On cutting day, an early winter hush blankets the site as the crew gently wraps branches in twine and burlap, careful not to snap a single limb. Cranes hoist the massive evergreen onto an industrial trailer specially engineered to distribute its weight evenly, avoiding strain on bridges and tunnels. The convoy, often led by police escorts and trailed by camera crews, moves through rural back roads and small-town main streets, where crowds snap photos and wave handmade signs reading NEW YORK BOUND! As the tree crawls slowly through tunnels, drivers hold their breath, navigating mere inches of clearance. By the time the seventy-to-one-hundred-foot-tall Norway spruce finally reaches Rockefeller Center, its journey has become a televised event, broadcast live from helicopters, watched by millions eager to witness living history in motion.
The tree-lighting ceremony unfolds with the solemnity and grandeur of a high holiday, as television cameras and commerce assume the roles of priest and congregation. In a typical year, around seven hundred thousand people attend in person, while another seven million watch on-screen. Yet amid the jubilant spectacle of its unveiling, the tree’s origins, selection process, and transportation recede into the background, overshadowed by celebrity interviews, raucous singing, and twirling skaters. The evergreen itself, an object of reverence and devotion, becomes almost incidental—a backdrop whose deeper significance is lost somewhere between entertainment and tradition.
Cut-your-own pine trees at Gaver Farm in Mount Airy, Maryland on December 17, 2023.
Image: Julia Nikhinson/AFP via Getty Images
By mid-January, the show is over. What began as an icon ends as wood. Most years, the once-grand Rockefeller spruce is carefully dismembered, its trunk milled into planks. Volunteers transport this precious lumber to Habitat for Humanity building sites, where the former celebrity begins its second career as anonymous floorboards, roof trusses, or picnic tables.
Even in death, the Rockefeller Center tree exposes a paradox at the heart of Christmas: the uneasy marriage of capitalism and faith, commerce and mythology. The holiday season is neatly packaged as a fairy tale for children, its pagan origins softened into gentle myths, its rituals distilled into magical fantasies. For many adults, however, the season is more about indulgence than mystery: Parties, feasts, alcohol, and frantic Black Friday stampedes blur the lines between meaningful tradition and empty routine.
The Christmas tree embodies all these tensions. To some, it symbolizes peace and goodwill. To others, it is merely a corporate publicity stunt sprinkled with glitter. A decorated evergreen in the heart of a bustling city may genuinely represent holiday cheer—but so, too, might eggnog, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or mounting credit card debt.
Still, the fleeting presence of Christmas trees every December only heightens their power as seasonal markers and cultural emblems. They are a sweet confection placed on the tongue and savored slowly until, with the turning of the New Year, their flavor dissolves and lingers only as a faint memory for eleven months. Perhaps this ephemeral cycle is precisely why evergreens resonate so profoundly. They mirror our own impermanence: always in motion, always fading. Magical yet melancholy, the trees offer both a celebration and a gentle farewell, rolled into one.
All the more reason, then, to enjoy them while we can.
Trent Preszler
is a professor of practice in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and serves as director of the Henry David Thoreau Foundation’s Planetary Solutions Initiative. After growing up on a cattle ranch in South Dakota and attending a one-room schoolhouse on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, his first job out of college was a White House internship for President Bill Clinton. Preszler received a BS from Iowa State University and an MS and a PhD from Cornell University. A former winemaker and wooden boatbuilder, his life was profiled in a documentary that won a New York Emmy Award in 2018.
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