NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, DC and LOS ANGLELES — The 2011 Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony, held Nov. 30 and broadcast live on NBC, has come a long way since workers at the office complex first pulled out the ladders and plugged in the lights in 1931. (The first ceremony took place two years later.) This year’s tree, a 74-foot spruce from Mifflinville, PA, featured 30,000 sparkling LED lights powered via 5 miles of cabling and topped by a six-sided, 9.5-foot-diameter, 550-lb. star made with 25,000 Swarovski crystals. The star itself was lit with 720 LEDs.
The 10-ton tree, erected by two cranes and wrapped in towering scaffolding as the decorations were installed, was lit as part of a full-scale production that included Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and performances by Justin Bieber, Tony Bennett, Cee Lo Green, Michael Buble, Neil Diamond, Carole King, Katharine McPhee, Javier Colon (NBC’s “The Voice”), Nickelodeon’s Big Time Rush and the Radio City Rockettes. The tree will stay lit through New Years, and the use of LED lighting is reducing the tree’s energy demands from an estimated 3,510 kwH per day to 1,297 kwH per day.
The tree lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center may have drawn the biggest crowds. They numbered in the tens of thousands, most of whom watched the shape of the tree sparkling in the dark, then set aglow via LED screens set up on street corners. But it wasn’t the only festive tradition drawing a crowd along with well-known VIPs.
The National Park Service’s National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony has an even longer legacy — it dates from 1923. This year’s event once again featured the First Family — Barack and Michelle Obama and children, plus performances by Big Time Rush, Ellie Goulding, OneRepublic, Rodney Atkins and Marsha Ambrosius.
The fourth-annual tree-lighting ceremony at Nokia Live in Los Angeles may not be able to compete with the other two in terms of longevity or Currier and Ives charm — it’s a 54-foot-high sculpture lit with 10,000 LEDs and shaped like a geometric cone. But the ceremony was also televised live with performances by JoJo, Il Volo, Javier Colon, Casey Abrams and Haley Reinhart, among others, including Olympic gold medalist Evan Lysacek on the Kings Holiday Ice Skating Rink.
