  "How many of you can sing all the songs playing on the ice rink from heart? " From a branch two feet to the north I hear, "It's not the music, it's the bells" Those silver bells, like the ones in the famous Christmas carol, driving the electricians crazy in the middle of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Stringing 30,000 Christmas lights over the course of a couple of weeks, and everyday, for twelve hours a day, hearing the bells of the Salvation Army clanging away.
But the repetitive clang of the bells sets a tempo for the repetitive task of working nine hours a day sinching&nbsp;lightbulb covered&nbsp;wires to a tree branch with electrical wire. It is a job that comes with a lot of pride, being responsible for making the tree glow. But it is tough, and some of these guys have been doing this for longer than I have been alive. You ask some guys, and they have to count backwards in five-year increments to get to the beginning of it all. The Rockefeller Center tree is a Christmas centerpiece that amazes those who know it, which in a day of television, internet and radio, means almost everyone. Hundreds of thousands of people from around the globe come to watch this inanimate object wrapped in electricity sit from December through January. They watch it on television, they see it in movies, they read about it in books. And what a wonderfully big and beautiful tree it is.
When you look at it objectively, the entire concept of the Christmas Tree is odd. It is an object that you hunt out and cut down to place in water and store in your house for anywhere from a week to a month. Some people put symbolic tokens on it, handmade Christmas crafts by tots and ornate, hand-blown antique glass bulbs, and some people just cover them in store bought crap.
Whichever way you look at it though, each tree, from the 8-inch high singing tree on a trucker's dashboard, to the 79-foot Norway Spruce in Rock Center, brings at least a moment of joy into all hearts when put up for the first time each Christmas season. This year, as part of my job as a PR assistant, I got to take photographers up in the tree for an inside glimpse of what happens when the scaffolding is up. Inside you see a whole microsociety of electricians, many of who you can't see from the street, straddling the main trunk, hugging branches as they reach for smaller branches that need a light. The wad of wires running vertical up through the trunk creates a vein of watts that runs as thick as a bodybuilders thigh straight to the top. Up there is a 21-point star that gets set into place shortly before the scaffolding comes off the tree. Every year they use the same star, with a fresh paint of gold over the solid metal sculpture. It is lifted into place via crane and tightened down over the top of the trunk of the mighty spruce.
I wonder if the electricians seeing their own tree at home for the first time, or seeing the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree brings that tinge of joy every season. Do these guys go home and decorate their own tree? Do their children practice wrapping every branch on their tree in the living room with Twinkle lights?
Do they decorate trees in their yards? It all makes me wonder. This year my roommate and I decorated our first Christmas tree in New York City. We bought a three foot spruce from a place around the block and decorated it with all the pagan flattery that you can buy from the local CVS store. Our boyfriends joined us and helped to make ornaments while we all drank champagne and listened to the Martina McBride Christmas album. Writing about it now makes it sounds like a really bad Newport cigarettes commercial, but in all honesty it really was quite fun. After we got it all decorated, we plugged in the lights and stepped back to look at our Christmas creation. And for the first time this season, I got that tinge of joy for the holiday, and my apartment felt a little more like my home as a kid. 
