Highlights

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The very first Christmas tree erected in Rockefeller Center was actually a gift from working people to themselves.

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Unlike this year’s seventy-four-foot-tall tree, wrapped in fifty thousand LED lights and crowned with a nine-hundred-pound, three-million-crystal Swarovski monstrosity, the workers’ tree was dressed in paper garlands, strings of cranberries, and tin cans provided by their families.

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Nearly a century later, the tree has become an emblem of corporate largesse and luxury consumerism.

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the Rockerfellers, have been replaced by a private real estate investment firm (Tishman Speyer) in concert with yet another family of billionaires (the Crown family).

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