New York did what New York does every December: it stopped, looked up, and turned on Christmas.
At precisely 10 pm on December 3, the lights rose on the Rockefeller Centre Christmas Tree, a 75-foot Norway Spruce standing tall above Midtown Manhattan. With 50,000 multi-coloured lights and the familiar Swarovski star glowing at its peak, the city’s most dependable seasonal ritual settled comfortably into place for 2025.
The ceremony was hosted by Reba McEntire and featured performances by Michael Bublé, Marc Anthony, Kristin Chenoweth, Brad Paisley, Gwen Stefani, and the ever-reliable Radio City Rockettes. The music was polished, the crowd obliging, the television production immaculately rehearsed. No surprises were promised, and none were required.
What keeps the Rockefeller Tree relevant is not the celebrity roster or the choreography. It is the quiet authority of repetition. This is an event that understands it does not need to reinvent itself. It only needs to return.
The first Rockefeller Christmas Tree went up in 1931, a modest 20-foot Balsam Fir erected during the darkest economic moment of modern American history. It was never meant to become a global theatre. It was simply a gesture of stubborn optimism. Nearly a century later, the scale has grown, but the meaning has not shifted much.
For New York’s tourism and retail sectors, the lighting still carries practical weight. The ceremony marks the city’s busiest trading period of the year, when hotels tighten, restaurants fill, and foot traffic through Midtown creeps steadily upward. Beneath the sparkle sits a reliable seasonal economy.
Yet it is not economics that draws people back to Rockefeller Plaza year after year. It is the reassurance of familiarity, the knowledge that some things still arrive on time, look the way they are meant to, and behave exactly as memory suggests.
For one winter evening in Manhattan, the noise of the city pauses just long enough for a tree to take centre stage. And that, for most, is quite enough Christmas to begin.
by Jason Smith – (c) 2025
Read Time: 2 minutes.
About the Writer
Jason Smith has the kind of story you can’t fake, built on long flights, new cities, and that unmistakable hum of hotel life that gets under your skin and never quite leaves. Half American, half Asian, he grew up surrounded by the steady rhythm of the tourism trade in the U.S., where his family helped others see the world long before he did.
Eager to carve out his own path, Jason packed his bags for Bangkok and the Asian Institute of Hospitality & Management, where he majored in Hotel Management and found a career and a calling. From there came years on the road, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, each stop adding another thread to his craft.
He made his mark in Thailand, eventually becoming Director of Sales for one of the country’s leading hotel chains. Then came COVID-19: borders closed, flights grounded, and a new chapter began.
Back home in America, Jason turned his knack for connection into words, joining Global Travel Media to tell the stories behind the check-ins written with the same warmth and honesty that have always defined him.
