Hand-built Christmas tree goes up overnight at Galleria
Teams spend hours on construction of the 56-foot-tall arboreal spectacle
Shereen McCrary oversaw the scene from the Galleria’s yellow parking garage, wearing the same outfit she’s worn every year for the occasion: sweatpants, Ugg boots and a zip-up hoodie.
And again, like every year, she felt scared to death. This night, the 56-foot-tall Galleria
Christmas tree was going up, and she and her husband were in charge of making sure it all came together.
Their team had been working for a week to pull pieces of the artificial tree from storage and assemble them in the garage, including 776 branches and a 14-foot tree top.
Her clothes were black. Her nails were red. Her blonde hair was cut in a bob. She drank
Coke from a Styrofoam cup and clutched a brown sack of miniature candies to hand out as the hours wore on.
It was going to be an all-night affair.
“Everybody has to be a thousand percent on,” she said. “Nobody can miss a beat.”
Just after 7 p.m. Sunday, the sprawling indoor shopping mall off Loop 610 had closed — the last skaters were gone from the ice rink and the first stages of tree building were underway.
Sure, Halloween just happened. Yes, this was the first weekend of November. The Galleria had been putting up its tree this early in the season since 1990, as McCrary remembered, the year her daughter got married. (The tree lighting is set for Saturday).
Some people lament how early the holiday season starts, particularly at shopping malls, but it brings McCrary a welcome sense of joy. She had been awake since 5 a.m. and still buzzed with energy. Galleria employees were pulling Homasote boards from compartments in the ice rink and placing them sideby-side over the ice to make it walkable. The flooring felt cold. At least one of McCrary’s employees wore two pairs of socks.
In front of her, several workers propped open the mall doors. At 7:21 p.m., she watched through circular sunglasses as they began hauling in the numbered pieces for the tree’s base, the same one that’s been used since it first went up 31 years ago.
“Go to the ice rink and receive it,” she directed someone over the sounds of nearby construction. A sense of urgency hung in the air.
Her employees in pairs carried each hulking piece up eight steps, into the bright lights of the food court, past Charley’s Philly Steaks, and Chili’s and Marble Slab to a ramp that led down to the rink. Then they returned to do it again and again.
“Ready?” Fernando Lazaro, 40, asked Leticia Hernandez, 52, as he passed her a piece of heavy plywood.
“No,” she replied, laughing. They wore t-shirts with slogans such as décor crew, light crew and flower power. Hernandez had matched her green flower gloves to her green shoelaces.
Randy Schumacher, the mall’s operations director, drilled a screw into the ice to mark the tree’s center. They’d dropped a plumb line from a gantry up above to measure the spot.
“Don’t mess up,” he reminded himself.
Schumacher, 63, has worked here 35 years and centered that very first tree. The first year, it rose too far from the power source. The second tree was too close; the star topper wouldn’t fit under the ceiling’s power cable.
They arranged the four center pieces, numbers 25 to 28, around the screw and fastened them together. This was critical; there would be no moving the tree once it was set. The center measured 40 feet from one wall and 39 feet, 8 inches from another, which sufficed. They set to work building the rest of the foundation.
Fear aside, McCrary loves this project. She figures it is as close as you get to the Rockefeller Center ice
rink tree in midtown Manhattan. A public relations agent for the Galleria looked on as she spoke, but she insisted that — of all the holiday work she does, from place to place — this tree is most important to her.
“It’s probably one of the prettiest trees in town,” her husband, Stephen, said. It is also rare to find one built by hand.
McCrary’s daughter, who works with her, had stocked up on sandwiches at Walmart and coffee and soda at Sam’s Club.
Chris Lane, the mall’s marketing director, came by with coffee and donuts. This was Lane’s third Christmas at the mall and he was still amazed by how many people it took to assemble the tree. “Houston’s tree,” he called it, describing it as part of holiday traditions for generations.
Not long before midnight, the base was finished, and a crew of riggers put together the lowest metal ring of the cone-shaped frame. “High flying trapeze artists,” McCrary calls them. Again, Schumacher fussed over centering it.
“Go ahead,” he shouted to the team around it. They shoved.
“Whoa!” he shouted. McCrary, watching silently, walked around to the other side.
“I don’t want to be off an inch,” she said.
They pushed again.
It was hard, tedious work. “I really hate this damn tree,” said engineer Brad Stanbery, 45, walking by, perhaps not entirely joking.
They got this frame in 2003. The LED-light branches that the mall bought three years ago were spread out on the other side of the rink in neat lines, sorted by ornament pattern. They needed to be fluffed and checked by McCrary before they could be installed in their place in the puzzle. Schumacher felt satisfied. “Don’t let it move,” McCrary said.
The riggers fetched the next row of the cone frame, climbing up to stack it on top of the first. They would do this level by level, climbing higher and higher to create the structure onto which the branches were fastened. The higher pieces would be passed up with a rope. There were at least eight hours of work to go, but Schumacher and his engineering crew were finished. It was McCrary’s show now.