A 115-foot-tall Christmas tree rolled into Citadel Outlets early Monday morning, kicking off the Commerce mall's holiday season nearly two and a half months before Christmas Day. The white fir traveled from Mount Shasta to Commerce in three days, and crews now have about two and a half weeks to dress it up before the mall's tree lighting concert.
A Six-Hundred-Mile Trip for California's Tallest Tree
According to KTLA, mall officials say the tree will be decorated with over 18,000 lights and 10,000 ornaments and bows over the next two weeks. The white fir was selected by Victor Serrao, who owns Victor's Christmas Trees, a company officials described as specializing in Christmas trees above 40 feet. That same specialty firm has supplied Citadel Outlets' towering trees in past years; a 2021 arrival described as California's largest fresh-cut Christmas tree was also sourced from the Mount Shasta area, according to a separate KTLA report from that year.
The journey itself is no quick errand. Getting a tree this size from the Shasta-area forests to the Commerce outlet center takes three to four days to cover roughly 600 miles, per LAist. Once it lands, the installation and decoration process has historically taken up to two weeks, the earlier KTLA report noted, which tracks with the roughly 19 days between this week's arrival and the mall's scheduled lighting ceremony.
Bigger Than the Hollywood Sign
Citadel Outlets has leaned into the tree's scale for years, and this year's comparisons are no different. Mall officials say the tree stands taller than seven double-decker buses stacked on top of each other by 10 feet, and it outsizes the Santa Monica Ferris wheel by 25 feet, the Rockefeller Center tree by 35 feet, Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland by 38 feet, and the Hollywood Sign by 70 feet, according to the same KTLA report. Those are striking numbers, though they echo the kind of landmark comparisons the mall has used before — a 2021 version of the display was pitched as 25 feet taller than the Santa Monica Pier's Ferris wheel and 40 feet taller than Rockefeller Center's tree, per the earlier KTLA account, suggesting the exact margins have shifted slightly from year to year depending on how each tree and its neighbors are measured.
The tree has become something of a holiday fixture for Southern California shoppers. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2019 that Citadel Outlets had already hosted record-tall cut Christmas trees for six years running, and the tradition carried into last year, when the mall again displayed a 115-foot white fir that remained up until early January, according to LAist's 2025 coverage.
Mark Your Calendar for November 7
Citadel Outlets will hold its tree lighting concert and ceremony on November 7, with the concert kicking off at 5 p.m. The event marks the 25th year the mall has held the celebration, and it is free and open to the public, according to the Citadel Outlets event page. As of Monday, Christmas itself was 67 days away, giving shoppers plenty of time to swing by and see the tree lit up before the holidays arrive.
