This is the Rockefeller Christmas tree’s surprising fate after it leaves NYC: ‘Just wow’
Every morning when Felicia Hanna grabs a coat from her closet, she finds herself face to face with a reminder that her home holds more holiday spirit than most.
Her Elkton, Maryland, home was built with lumber cut from a former Rockefeller Center Christmas tree — which was processed into lumber and given to a charity group after delighting Manhattan revelers during the 2021 Yuletide season.
“It’s so special. It’s not just a Christmas tree anymore,” Hanna told The Post.
“We watched that tree on the television in New York City, and now I have it in my home forever.”
Every year since 2007, Rockefeller Center has donated its tree to the housing organization so that its lumber can be milled and used to help at least one family build their new home.
Hanna’s home marked the first time the tree was returned to its original community for a new lease on life.
The 79-foot-tall behemoth had been growing across town on Devon and Julie Price’s property until Rockefeller Center’s head gardener, Erik Pauzé, came knocking in 2021.
The couple debated whether to let go of their tree, which they had watched grow for the three decades they lived in their home — though the tree is estimated to have been closer to 90 years old. Ultimately, they decided the opportunity was too great to pass up.
Around the same time the sprawling behemoth was being adorned with 50,000 lights and celebrated by the likes of Harry Connick Jr. and the Rockettes, Hanna was applying to the housing organization — a gamble she felt like she had a slim chance of winning.
As fate would have it, Hanna and her three young kids were chosen — and floored to discover that the tree they saw on television would soon make up their future house.
“It felt like I won the lottery,” Hanna, a pharmacy technician, recalled.
The process was long: After the Rockefeller Center tree was removed from the busy Big Apple hotspot, it was processed in a dry kiln and sawn into 48 2-inch-by-6-inch-by-8-foot beams — each of which was branded with the words “Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree 2021.”
Ironically, what made the spruce a fantastic Christmas tree also made it structurally weak: The branches that spanned 46 feet in diameter left lots of knots in the wood, so the beams were mainly used for the windowsills and support for the closet shelves.
Hanna’s children — Mya, 14, Nicholas, 9, and Kash, 7 — excitedly show off the unique branding when they have friends over, but what makes the house truly special is how the community helped it come together, according to the Maryland mom.
Devon Price himself helped hammer the beams into place after students from Cecil County School of Technology — a local vocational school where Julie Price once worked as an administrator — built the structure as a prefab home.
“They always tell you the community is part of Habitat, that they can’t do it without the volunteers. Honestly, the volunteers make it happen and literally a tree from the community, from Elkton is now being put in my house. Just wow,” Hanna said.
The moment still remains special to Price and his family — three years after his spruce captured nationwide attention, he still marvels at the home he helped build.
“I always look that way when I drive by. I always look over to see … and if [a friend] is in town that hadn’t seen it before, I take them by and show them where the lumber went,” Price, 63, told The Post.
Fortunately, Price was also allowed a momento of his charitable deed each — the retired energy company services director took home one of the lumber pieces branded with the unique legend “Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree 2021.”
“It’s special to have something that’s special to the city of New York and to everybody else,” Price explained.
“And to know it didn’t just get sent to the landfill or get burned up or get ground up into mulch, it’s pretty cool that it’s actually in a couple of other people’s homes and that it was made useful long past its pretty display in the center. That’s so special.”
