The Rockefeller Christmas Tree has officially been selected!
Although it feels like summer just ended, we’re clearly very close to the winter holiday season: Rockefeller Center announced that it has officially selected the 2024 Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. For the first time since 1959, the tree, a Norway Spruce, will hail from Massachusetts. It is, as they say, the most wonderful time of the year!
Officials will cut down the 11-ton conifer—more details: it is 74 feet tall and 43 feet wide—on November 7 and then transport it to midtown Manhattan by November 9.
As is usually the case, the tree will then be wrapped with over 50,000 multicolored, energy efficient LED lights, topped with a 900-pound Swarovski star covered in three million crystals and put on display for locals and tourists to see until mid-January 2025.
The official lighting ceremony will take place on December 4 and be broadcast live on TV.
Just in case you were wondering, after the New Year, the tree is milled into lumber for Habitat for Humanity.
In addition to the lighting ceremony and the spectacle that the tree’s mere presence is throughout the holiday season, there are a ton of different activations and things to do around Rockefeller Center during this time of the year. In primis: going ice skating at the on-site rink, which is actually already open.
Throughout the past few years, New Yorkers also got hang out inside cozy igloos that were set up by the Rockefeller Center for a few weeks. Here’s to hoping they will be back in 2024 as well!