Your Halloween costume may very well still be draped over a chair or sitting in your kitchen trash, but if you’ve recently ventured on the 5 freeway just south of East L.A., you know that recognizable building-sized bow can only mean one thing: Christmas is coming.
We may be more than a month and a half from the holiday, but the folks at the Citadel Outlets sure are ready to celebrate. The (dare we say iconic?) Assyrian palace–themed mall welcomed its Christmas tree to the premises in mid-October, and they’re already lighting it up this weekend. On Saturday, November 7, the Commerce outlet mall will flip the switch on the thousands of bulbs that cover its towering tree.
Though you may not typically associate Commerce with the North Pole, the Citadel’s holiday display routinely takes the title of the world’s tallest fresh-cut Christmas tree: Its 115-foot-tall white fir originated near Mt. Shasta, took a three-day, 600-mile journey to Commerce and then, over the past two weeks, began to be sculpted with extra branches and decorated with over 18,000 lights and 10,000 bows and ornaments.
It’ll serve as the main attraction on Saturday night during the Citadel Outlets’ 25th Annual Tree Lighting Ceremony and Concert. The evening kicks off at 5pm with a free concert that features Keyla Richardson, SZN4, Full Circle Boys and OCSA Montage!—oh, and Santa, of course—as well as the debut of the shopping center’s nightly snow flurries.
Just to put things into perspective, the outlet has shared some helpful size comparisons for its superlative tree: It’s 25 feet taller than the Santa Monica Pier’s Ferris wheel, 38 feet taller than Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle and 70 feet taller than the Hollywood Sign. But more importantly for our own city pride: It’s 35 feet taller than New York’s famous Rockefeller Center tree.
