Though the spectacle holds all of the standard markers of a production produced by and for capitalism — not least because it bears the name of America’s first billionaire family — its origins are quite the opposite. The very first Christmas tree erected in Rockefeller Center was actually a gift from working people to themselves.
On Christmas Eve of 1931, Italian American construction workers building out New York City’s Rockefeller Center put up a twenty-foot evergreen tree in the middle of their job site. Despite this being the height of the Great Depression — which saw an estimated 64 percent of construction workers unemployed — the workers pooled their resources to purchase this first tree. It was a financial stretch for workers whose weekly wages fell around $20 to $25 (or $400 to $500 in today’s dollars).
Unlike this year’s seventy-four-foot-tall tree, wrapped in fifty thousand LED lights and crowned with a nine-hundred-pound, three-million-crystal Swarovski monstrosity, the workers’ tree was dressed in paper garlands, strings of cranberries, and tin cans provided by their families. One photo remains of the workers gathered in front of their tree. They’re in line waiting to be paid by their employers, watching in their workwear as a man in a coat and top hat walks by.
The difficult times weren’t shared by all. By the time this photo was taken, John D. Rockefeller was already retired, with a net worth between $1.5 billion and $2 billion ($34.5 to $46 billion today). “Good times are coming!” he’s said to have exclaimed to the 130 guests attending the annual Christmas party at his Florida estate just days after the workers put up their tree. As chief officer of the capitalist class of his day, he was optimistic that yet more riches were on the horizon.
It’s said that the Rockefeller family liked the workers’ tree so much that they slapped their name on it, and in 1933, a New York City holiday tradition was born. When the Rockefellers took over, the twenty-foot tree with the makeshift spirit of Charlie Brown was replaced by a statelier fifty-foot tree. Each subsequent tree has sought to outdo the grandeur (or tastelessness, depending on your view) of the last, with an aesthetic increasingly unmoored from the original sentiment behind the tree. By the 1950s, scaffolding was required to decorate the tree. The task has since ballooned into a multiday job requiring hundreds of workers and a crane to erect and dress.