U.S. Speaker poised to help kick off Christmas season

One of the key duties of the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives – now Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana – is to help illuminate the Capitol Christmas Tree on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol to mark the beginning of the holiday season.

 

The Speaker is always accompanied by an elementary school student from the state that supplies the tree.

 

The winning tree is a 63-foot Norway spruce that is coming from Monongahela National Forest in the Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia. 

The student selected to participate in the 2023 ceremony is Ethan Reese, a fourth grader from Beverly, W.Va., a small town near the forest. He won a statewide essay contest.

 

Ironically, Ethan’s great-great grandfather Arthur Wood was named superintendent of the Monongahela National Forest in 1931. “He set a plan in motion to plant millions of trees to rebuild the forest for future generations,” Ethan wrote. 

“Thanks to those efforts,” Ethan said, “I am lucky my generation knows the Mountain State as one covered in ‘Endless trees and Wonderful wildflowers, and home to many Wild animals.’” (Ethan’s capitalization connects to the essay contest theme, “Endlessly Wild & Wonderful.”) 

The tree lighting ceremony will be conducted at 5 p.m. on a date to be determined after Thanksgiving. 

The tradition of placing a Christmas tree (known fondly as “The People’s Tree”) outdoors on the Capitol lawn began in 1964, when Rep. John W. McCormack of Massachusetts was Speaker.

 

Beginning in 1970, the U.S. Forest Service, an agency within the Department of Agriculture, took on the responsibility of selecting a tree from one of the country’s 154 national forests. 

With this year’s selection, three of the winning trees were grown in the Monongahela National Forest – including a 40-foot Norway spruce in 1970 and a 41-foot red spruce in 1976. 

Pisgah National Forest in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina also has produced three winning trees. They were a 41-foot Fraser fir in 1974, a 50-foot Fraser fir in 1998 and a 78-foot red spruce in 2022 that was named “Ruby.” 

Ruby was regarded much like a rock star last year by the news media. Harvested in Haywood County at age 75, “Ruby towered above her neighbors” in the Pisgah National Forest, reported Martha Quillin of The (Raleigh) News & Observer

 

She was “ceremoniously severed” as film crews rolled their cameras. Quillen reported: “Climbers had attached lines from a crane near the top of the tree, so that when the blade cut through the last splinters of Ruby’s trunk, the spruce jumped several feet into the air and dangled like one of the thousands of handmade ornaments with which she will later be adorned.” 

“‘We have liftoff,’ the Forest Service camera operator said as the cut was complete and the tree swung free. Crews whooped as if Santa’s sleigh itself had left the ground.” 

Quillen reminded her readers: “In North Carolina, the nation’s second-largest producer of Christmas trees, the beginning of the annual harvest season is as welcome as a visit from ol’ Santa.” 

Enroute to Washington, D.C., a two-week “mountains to the sea” trek across North Carolina took Ruby to 14 communities, including three in eastern North Carolina – Kinston, New Bern and Manteo. 

Ruby was special and a member of a dwindling forest species. Her cones were collected to grow red spruce seedlings, as part of a major reforestation project being conducted by scientists at Southern Highlands Reserve near Lake Toxaway in Transylvania County, N.C. 

We’ll look in on their work soon.