BGuthrie Photos: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2002)

DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2002):

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Description of Pictures: 2002 -- Douglas Fir -- 70 feet (21 m) -- Umpqua National Forest -- Oregon -- The tree was lit by Dennis Hastert on December 12 in a ceremony including performances by the United States Navy Band, the Umpqua Singers from Umpqua Community College, and the Congressional Chorus. Decorated with 6,000 ornaments crafted and donated by the people of Oregon, the three was lit with 10,000 lights. Delivery of the tree from Umpqua National Forest took 22 days, with the tree arriving at the Capitol on December 2. During the ceremony, Hastert was presented with a tree ornament, in the likeness of the Capitol Dome and made from marble from the original east front steps of the House wing, by Ronald A. Sarasin, president of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.[14]

Tree: Douglas Fir from Umpqua National Forest, Oregon
During Christmas, both the White House and the Capitol display Christmas trees prominently in their back yards. The White House one tends to be a pre-fab piece that doesn't change much each year--the variety is, instead, created by 50+ state and province trees which have hand-made decorations. For the Capitol, though, a tree is cut down from a national forest and trekked over here and filled with thousands of hand-made ornaments from the state that provided the tree. This year, the tree was taken from a national forest in Oregon. The sign points out that the forest has 50 percent old growth timber, something which I'm sure makes some industry groups and administrations salivate over.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] CAPX_021217_03.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] CAPX_021217_22.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] CAPX_021217_26.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[4] CAPX_021221_011.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] CAPX_021221_013.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] CAPX_021221_021.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[7] CAPX_021221_041.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[8] CAPX_021221_046.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[9] CAPX_021221_048.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[10] CAPX_021221_052.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[11] CAPX_021221_056.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[12] CAPX_021221_059.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[13] CAPX_021221_080.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[14] CAPX_021221_082.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[15] CAPX_021221_090.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[16] CAPX_021221_100.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. CAPX_021221_013.JPG: Christmas tree @ the Capital
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Wikipedia Description: Capitol Christmas Tree
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Capitol Christmas Tree (formerly the Capitol Holiday Tree) is the decorated tree that is erected annually on the West Front Lawn of the United States Capitol, in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the Christmas holiday season. The selection, installation, and decoration of the tree are all overseen by the Superintendent of the Capitol Grounds of the Architect of the Capitol (AOC).
Records of the AOC indicate that a Christmas Tree was purchased in 1919; however, it was not until 1964, one year after the suggestion of John W. McCormack, the 53rd Speaker of the House, that a procedure was established for the installation of a yearly tree.
The 1963 tree was a live Douglas-fir, purchased from a Pennsylvania nursery. It was re-decorated each year through 1967 when it was severely damaged in a wind storm and subsequently died as a result of root damage. After the 1963 tree died, white pines from Maryland were cut down and put on display for the 1968 and 1969 seasons. Beginning in 1970, trees have been provided by the U.S. Forest Service from various National Forests.
The Capitol Christmas Tree is traditionally lit during a ceremony at the beginning of December, and remains lit each night though New Year's Day.
Name controversy
In the late 1990s, the Capitol Christmas Tree was renamed to the Capitol Holiday Tree. There was never a clear explanation as to why the name change occurred, but the name change raised controversy. On November 29, 2005, the day after the 2005 tree arrived from New Mexico, the tree was renamed the Capitol Christmas Tree at the request of Dennis Hastert, the 59th Speaker of the House.
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Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (yyyy)) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2023_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2023) (13 photos from 2023)
- 2022_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2022) (79 photos from 2022)
- 2021_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2021) (101 photos from 2021)
- 2020_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2020) (18 photos from 2020)
- 2019_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2019) (57 photos from 2019)
- 2018_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol (exterior) -- Christmas Tree (2018) (55 photos from 2018)
- 2017_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2017, plus tail-end shots from 2016) (106 photos from 2017)
- 2016_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2016) (11 photos from 2016)
- 2015_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2015) (42 photos from 2015)
- 2013_DC_CapitolX: DC -- U.S. Capitol Grounds -- Christmas Tree (2013) (26 photos from 2013)
- ...More (List all 21 pages)...
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Capitols] [Nighttime] [US Capitol (Everything)] [US Capitol (Non-Events)] [Winter] [US Capitol Complex]
2002 photos: This was the year I started the photo web site. It started to come together in August 2002, mostly as a way of allowing me to keep track of the pictures I was taking. It took awhile to add some basic bells and whistles (logging didn't get added until November) but it's been pretty much like it started out since then. Archaic but working, and free! Trips this year: Two weeks out west, one week in New York, and one week down south. Image quality isn't going to be very good for the first half of this year because these are scans of prints. Equipment this year: I took the plunge and bought my first digital camera. It was August 2002 and I bought an Epson PhotoPC 3100Z. While a nice camera, it had some quirks and bumping it would result in it being totally out of focus until you manually shut it down -- something which blurred almost every picture I took in New York City one day.
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