Free as in Pizza

For more than a decade, my dad’s rigging company has had the job of putting up the Christmas decorations at Pentagon City Fashion Mall. The mall likes to get the decorations in place as soon as possible after Halloween, to maximize the holiday effect on shoppers. We got started on November 9th this year.

It’s sometimes hard to find enough workers to get the job done in the 2-3 night time-frame that the mall asks for. I usually help out on Christmas Tree night, since it’s important to get the whole tree put together in one night. My brother Ned and my friend Mike also worked.

The steel frame of the tree is stored out in a shed in the mall’s parking garage. There are also huge decorative chandeliers that go in the air around it, and we had to move them out of the way to get the tree out first. They don’t look like chandeliers until they’re assembled.

We have to bring the fake tree limbs and the decorations down from the roof in hampers. There’s a service elevator on the food court loading dock behind the giant grease dumpster that goes up to the top floor. The elevator is very slow.

A second elevator goes from the top floor up to the roof. The tree accessories are stored in an airplane-hanger type of shed.

The limbs were piled relatively neatly in the corner this year. The mall stores all kinds of random stuff in this shed, including their Easter decorations.

From the roof you can see down into the mall. By 11 PM the upper floors are quiet, although people are still walking through the food court, from the Metro station to the parking garage.

Once everything is inside, it’s time to start assembling. We had two other guys helping out, nephews of our contact person at the mall. The tree is made out of steel rings, and the bottom rings are bolted together from four pieces.

After the 3rd ring goes on, you have to climb the tree to work on it. The ladder in the middle will stay there through Christmas in case something goes wrong with the lights at the top, and because it’s impossible to remove.

The rungs of the tree bolt together at 3-5 points, depending on the size of the rung. It’s important to get everything bolted down, since you’ll be standing on the rung you just worked on in a few minutes. We put several heavy-duty cable ties around each rung as safeties.

My brother is less afraid of heights than I am. One of the the plates for bolting the rungs together was missing, so he put a C-clamp on it. The wide base of the tree makes it very stable, and there’s not much actual danger unless you slip. No one ever slips.

Once all the rungs are in place, we move the tree over to the first floor balcony above Texas BBQ, (which used to be Frank & Stein, I think). This allows us to work on the top of the tree from the balcony, although for certain parts it’s still necessary to stand on the tree. I put the top on by myself this year. Maybe I’m getting better about heights.

My dad wanted to double-check that every single bulb on the top of the tree was still working after it was connected. This meant balancing on the railing and holding onto the tree with one hand.

We tried to get him to let us rotate the tree so he could check the other side more easily, but he didn’t want to do that. In previous years we would also hang a hundred golden angels from the crossbeams above the food court, and he would sometimes climb out on the beams to bring things to the up riggers.

There are lots of bulbs to be checked. In addition to the electric branches, we decorate the tree with fake sprigs of fruit and red and gold ornaments.

By 3 AM we had the top of the tree done, as well as a little bit of one side. Typically we work from the top down, row by row, to leave a clear path. But since only one or two people can work at the top, it makes sense to start decorating one side at the same time.

Checking the bulbs on the branches is prickly business. The bulbs go bad easily, so hardly any branches have all their bulbs working. This year we went through 15-20 new boxes of bulbs, with 25 bulbs per box.

By 4 AM we had half the height of the tree decorated. The lower rungs need successively more branches and ornaments, but the work gets easier because you’re lower to the ground. Each branch has to be plugged in to a ring of power outlets on the frame. I stayed up in the tree plugging and hanging, while my brother carried branches and bags of ornaments up to me.

Occasionally I had to get some stuff from the hampers we left in the back corridor behind the mall management office. The hallways back there are a little spooky at night.

By 5 AM we had a few more rungs decorated, and it was time to wrap up for the night. I had hoped we’d be able to finish it completely in one night, but we had spent a lot of time making sure everything was straight. If the branches are still compressed or twisted from storage, the tree looks crooked. We put the remaining branches on to hide the frame.

The finished product looks pretty elegant. The whole package includes chandeliers and glowing stars hung from the ceiling. After the two-month-long holiday season, the mall will want us to remove the decorations even more quickly than we put them up, probably on the 26th or 27th of December.

tagged arlington, christmas, jobs