Otsego Sends Another Spruce, the Rockefeller Center Tree Is In

The 2026 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is a 76-foot Norway spruce from West Edmeston, in Otsego County, New York. Crews cut it on Thursday, November 5, and it arrived in Midtown on Saturday, November 7, for a lighting on Wednesday, December 2.

For now it stands dark. The switch is 25 days away, and until then the most famous tree in New York is just a very large spruce in a Midtown plaza, waiting for its wiring.

What Is This Year's Tree?

According to amNY, the spruce was donated by Rebecca Decker. It is about 75 years old, roughly 50 feet across and about 11 tons. West Edmeston sits about 200 miles north of Manhattan. When it is lit, the tree will carry more than 50,000 multicolored LEDs, about five miles of lights, under the Swarovski star.

The lighting is part of NBC's live broadcast, Christmas in Rockefeller Center, on December 2. NBC New York reports that the tree will stay up until January 9. After that it is cut up on the plaza, milled at a yard in New Jersey into two-by-fours and two-by-sixes stamped with a Rockefeller Center mark, and donated by Tishman Speyer, which owns and runs the center, to Habitat for Humanity.

By our count, that leaves 25 days between the tree's arrival and the lighting, and 38 days from the lighting to the last day of the display.

Why Does Otsego Keep Coming Up?

This is the third Rockefeller Center tree from Otsego County in eleven seasons. The 2016 tree came from Oneonta. The 2020 tree came from West Oneonta. Now West Edmeston.

The local paper in Otsego County told the story behind the 2020 tree as it left. AllOtsego reported that Erik Pauze, Rockefeller Center's head gardener, had first seen that spruce in 2016. "When I was here in 2016, I came around the corner and there was this beautiful tree," he told the paper. "But it wasn't quite ready yet. So for four years, I've been coming up twice a year to water and feed it."

The cutting itself was quick. The paper reported that woodsmen from Rockefeller Center and a landscaping company from Newburgh brought the 75-foot tree down in less than three minutes while more than 50 people watched, then laid it on a flatbed for the drive south. This year's tree followed the same calendar. Rockefeller Center announced it on Monday, October 26, NBC New York reported, ten days before the saw.

The same paper described the 2016 tree, donated by Angie and Graig Eichler of Country Club Road in Oneonta, as a 96-foot spruce and the second largest in Rockefeller Center history. The year-by-year tree list we used for our count gives it as 94 feet. Either way it is the tallest tree on the plaza since 2000. The tallest on record is the 1999 tree, a 100-foot spruce from Killingworth, Connecticut.

Until then the most famous tree in New York is just a very large spruce in a Midtown plaza.

Where Have the Trees Come From?

We counted every tree from 2000 through 2026, 27 in all, using the year-by-year list on Wikipedia's Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree page, which records height, species, town and lighting date for each. Every one of the 27 was a Norway spruce.

New York State supplied 12 of them. New Jersey and Connecticut supplied five each, Pennsylvania three, and Maryland and Massachusetts one each.

The tilt toward New York is recent. From 2000 through 2014, New York supplied three of 15 trees. From 2015 through 2026 it supplied nine of 12. The last tree from Connecticut was in 2013 and the last from New Jersey in 2012.

The heights cluster tightly. The average of the 27 trees is about 78 feet and the median is exactly 76, the height of this year's tree. Thirteen were taller and ten were shorter. The shortest of the period was the 71-foot tree from Suffern, New York, in 2004.

The lighting has always fallen between November 28 and December 4 in these years. This year's December 2 lands near the middle of that range.

What to Know Before You Go

The tree can be seen from the plaza or from the rink at Rockefeller Center, amNY reports, and visiting hours have not yet been announced. The lighting broadcast airs on NBC on Wednesday, December 2, starting at 7 p.m. The tree stays up through January 9, 2027, which carries it past the other fixed points of the city's winter calendar, including Phish's late-December stand at the Garden.

The plaza has had a busy autumn. The TODAY anchors turned it into a costume party on Halloween, when Sheinelle Jones dressed as a Rockette in a costume modeled on the tree. The real one is in place now. West Edmeston has a stump, and Midtown has 76 feet of spruce waiting for a switch.