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Okay, so we may not be able to launch a health care initiative, and we're getting fatter and slower by the day. But you know what? We fking rule at Christmas.

 

Christmas is the consumerist bacchanalia, bursting with orgasmic shop-‘til-you-drop revelry. It's the one holiday perfectly tailored to not only capitalism but the ideology of super-sized, bombastic displays of generosity and love-thy-neighbor, all of which can be conveniently forgotten about a week later, when the new year has rung, the afterglow has faded and we're left facing the long dark tea time of the soul that is January and the ensuing ass-end of winter's months with an eggnog headache and pile of credit card bills. But man, is it beautiful while it lasts.

Nowhere else is this better described, physically and metaphorically, than our fixation on larger-than-life, mine-is-bigger-than-yours phallic foliage representations. That's right, the Christmas tree. Thrusting forth from the ground in every metropolitan area, these beheaded behemoths take a page from the theology side of the holiday, giving their lives to stand tall and represent our seasonably appropriate love of fellow man, flooding our populace with pine-scented pheromones of consumerist holiday joy that help us to temporarily forgive each other's sins. And don't give us your Technicolor aluminum or plastic jobs, or floating frames. No, in America we want the real McCoy, crown jewels in a $3.4 billion industry ripped from a forest somewhere, an organic symbol of our national holiday virility.

And because this is America, it's all about the bragging rights. So whose is the biggest?

You'd be surprised.

New York: Standing firm in front of Rockefeller Center, the NYC tree weighs in at 12 tons and 75 years old, thursting upward to 76' tall.

Washington, D.C.: An Engelmann spruce from Northern Washington, the official tree of our nation's capitol is a towering 88'.

 

San Francisco: Keeping a mellow vibe while sitting on the dock of a bay, watching the time... Oh, you get it. Anyway, SF's tree is just 60' and chilling on Pier 39.

Milwaukee: The Midwest is a humble place, and, well, this year's 40' tall Colorado Blue Spruce is just that, though it is heavy with five thousand lights.

Los Angeles: Of course, LA takes things a little more seriously than their northern neighbors, especially when it comes to appearances and shape. Which is why they doled out around a $1000 a foot for Fashion Island's 90' beauty. Boston: Beantown's historic Faneuil Hall will be a-glow from 30 thousand lights enshrouding their 80' green monster.

 

Kansas City, Missouri: Down on Crown Center, they're getting down by putting up a 100' tree, which is then recycled into ornaments to fund next year's celebration.

Anthem, Arizona: All of these are small potatoes, however, mere seedlings, when compared to the giant that is being erected in an outlet mall in arid Anthem, Arizona. Shipped from the Shasta-Trinity forest in Northern California on a 75-foot flatbed, boasting a staggering three miles of LED lights and three thousand ornaments and bows, their 112 foot behemoth weighs twelve tons and is so big that, since sunlight couldn't filter all the way down to its base causing it to grow in a shape that didn't meet the expected aesthetics, neighboring trees were also uprooted and "plugged" into its stem with a series of glue and fastener-less cuts and wedges, nip-and-tucking it like a Beverly Hills soccer mom to achieve the desired voluptuous profile.

 

AND back to Los Angeles: Oh, you thought 112' was cool? Meh. Apparently, it's a battle of the outlets malls, and sunny SoCal ain't about to be outdone. The Citadel Outlets have gone and gotten their mittened mitts on a 115 footer from, where else, the Shasta Trinity forest. Twenty feet longer than a basketball court, they even topped 'er off with, apropos, the world's largest bow.

And the winner is... Couer d'Alene, Idaho. Way up north, they grow 'em big. 162 feet big, to be exact, which is so darn tall it takes 40 thousand LED lights and a ten-foot star to finish off the holiday vibes. The best part? It's a living tree, meaning that next year, it's still gonna be there, growing bigger and pumping out the kind of O2 only a towering photosynthesizing beast like this could.

 

But who holds the title for tallest ever?

There's some dispute, actually. According to the LA Times, the Guinness record is held by a 221' Douglas Fir that loomed over Seattle's Northgate Shopping Mall way back in 1950, though a tree farm owner from New York calls bullshit on this, claiming it was actually assembled from trees laid end-to-end to shape it and not a single unit. He believes he was the grower/installer of the true top of the tree triangle, a 135-foot needle-y pole of festiveness that stood over Six Fags in Vallejo, California in 2007.

 

To the average citizen, it matters not.

Christmas is, literally by design, everyone's favorite time of year. Kids love presents, parents at least pretend to love thy neighbors, and it's a month or two -- or three, depending on how frisky Madison Avenue is feeling -- where we can all embrace the communal idealism of one big happy nuclear family before the ultimate fallout that happens when you get too many people of the same bloodline in the same place and mix in a few gallons of spiked punch. It's the ultimate joy-spewing annual climax of the consumer culture creation myth, and, for those few months, faux or not, there's nothing better. Bring on the fat men in the suits.

Read more: In Search of the Tallest Christmas Tree in America - Esquire
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