Record tree may not be up for Christmas

A BID to erect the world’s tallest artificial Christmas tree is looking unlikely to be up in time for Christmas Day, organisers in Sri Lanka say.

Hundreds of port workers and volunteers were scrambling yesterday to build the enormous tree on a popular beachside promenade in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital.

Once assembled, the steel-and-wire frame should stand 98 metres (320 feet) high – more than 40 metres (131 feet) taller than the current record-holder.

Organisers said they wanted the tree – which is costing £64,000 – to help promote ethnic and religious harmony in the Buddhist-majority nation.

“This is just to show the world that we can live as one country, one nation,” said the former cricket player Arjuna Ranatunga, now Sri Lanka’s minister of ports and shipping.

“It’s like a once-in-alifetime opportunity to see such a thing being erected with your own eyes,” store clerk Charith Nissanka, 38, said as he walked by the construction site, strewn with steel pipes and thousands of metres of netting, on to which the ornaments will be attached.

Eventually, there will be more than one million natural pine cones attached to the tree, topped by a 6-metre-high (20-foot-high) shining star.

Currently, the record is held by a Chinese firm that put up a 55-metrehigh (180ft) tree-like tower in the city of Guangzhou last year.