This weekend’ s performances at Muskegon’s Frauenthal Center for the Performing Arts are sold out for Mona Shores High School’s 33rd annual Singing Christmas Tree concert. WGVU visited with the choir to check out what makes America’s Tallest Singing Christmas Tree so popular?
“It is called America’s Tallest Singing Christmas Tree. It is 67 feet tall which is the tallest singing Christmas tree in the United States and we think the world.”
Shawn Lawton is Mona Shores High School Choir director and the director of the singing Christmas tree.
“There are, this year, 256 Mona Shores High School Choir students in the tree. It takes about two days for a group of 30 or 40 parents to put the tree together. We haul it all in in semis. It’s like a giant erector set. It’s made all of steel. There are also panels that are covered in greenery which makes it look like a tree and then 25,000 lights which are woven into those panels and they all get connected together and then that allows the tree to look like a real tree and be lit.”
“Well, when I was at the very top of the tree I was looking down and I was like, ‘Oh my, gosh!’”
That’s Noah Patterson who is a senior at Mona Shores High School.
“And I am at the top of the singing Christmas tree as the angel.”
Lawton lays out the musical program. “You’re going to hear everything from gospel music to jazz to popular music to sacred music, secular music. This has just been wildly popular. We have people flying in to see it these days, people staying in downtown hotels. We have tour buses coming in nowadays. It’s quite the event.”
Patrick Center, WGVU News.