The Tree Halifax Sends Boston Every Year

Every year, in late November, a logging crew in Nova Scotia takes down a particular 13-to-15-meter white spruce or balsam fir — selected the previous summer from a private landowner’s property — and prepares it for transport. The tree is loaded onto a low-bed truck. A small ceremony is held at the loading site. The truck then drives for two days, accompanied by an RCMP escort across the New Brunswick border and a Maine state police escort across Maine, and delivers the tree to Boston Common in central Boston, Massachusetts. There it is set up at the corner of Tremont and Park Streets. It is lit, with great public ceremony, on the first Thursday of December.

The tradition has been continuous since 1971. The total Nova Scotian government cost — for the tree, the cutting, the trucking, the escort — is approximately C$180,000 per year. The Province of Nova Scotia covers it from the operational budget of its Department of Natural Resources. The tree is given to Boston as an explicit and annual thank-you for a particular act of American generosity that took place on a particular night in December 1917.

The night in question was 6 December 1917, the day the Mont-Blanc exploded in Halifax Harbour, and the relief that followed the explosion came overwhelmingly from Boston.

What Boston did in 1917

The Halifax explosion at 9:04 a.m. on 6 December 1917 killed approximately 1,800 people instantly, injured 9,000, destroyed the north end of the city, and was followed within hours by a blizzard that dropped 40 cm of snow on the ruins. Telegraph lines through Nova Scotia went down. Rescue trains from the rest of Atlantic Canada could not reach the city through the storm. By the afternoon of 6 December, Halifax was a half-destroyed, half-frozen city of survivors trying to dig out injured family members from collapsed houses with no functioning telephone, electric, or rail connection to the outside world.

The first long-distance dispatch to leave Halifax reached the Canadian Pacific Railway office in Montreal by mid-afternoon on 6 December. From Montreal it was forwarded south. By evening it was in New York. By 9 p.m. it was in Boston. The Massachusetts Public Safety Committee, the state’s wartime emergency-coordination body, convened an emergency meeting at 10 p.m. on the night of 6 December. By 1 a.m. on the morning of 7 December a relief train was being assembled at South Station in Boston: doctors, nurses, surgical equipment, blankets, food, fuel. The train left Boston that morning. It pushed through the New England blizzard at low speed. It reached Halifax on the morning of 8 December — approximately 60 hours after the explosion, faster than any Canadian relief train had managed.

The Boston team set up field hospitals in the Halifax YMCA, the Masonic Hall, and several private houses. They evacuated the most seriously burned by ship back to Boston. They stayed for several weeks. The mayor of Halifax later estimated that the Boston relief had saved approximately a thousand additional lives — survivors who would have died of exposure, infection, or untreated injuries had they been left to wait for slower Canadian assistance.

The Halifax authorities, in January 1918, voted to send a thank-you gift to Boston in time for the following Christmas. The gift was a Christmas tree — selected from Nova Scotian forest, shipped by rail, set up on the Boston Common. It was lit during the 1918 holiday season as part of the city’s regular Christmas decorations. The gesture was reported in the Boston Globe on 20 December 1918, briefly, on an inside page.

Then the tradition was forgotten for fifty-three years.

Why it came back

Gerald Regan, the Premier of Nova Scotia from 1970 to 1978, was a Halifax lawyer who had grown up hearing his father’s stories about the 1917 explosion and the Boston relief. In 1971, looking for goodwill gestures to strengthen Nova Scotia’s tourism appeal in the American Northeast, Regan’s office proposed reviving the 1918 tree gift as an annual tradition. The Massachusetts state government accepted. The first modern tree was shipped in November 1971 and lit on the Common in early December.

It has been continuous since. The tree selection has become a small province-wide tradition: any Nova Scotian landowner who has a suitable tree (white spruce or balsam fir, between 13 and 15 meters tall, well-shaped, accessible by logging road) can submit it for consideration. A Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources forester does the final selection in the summer, choosing the year’s tree from the candidates and contacting the family. The cutting in November is a small ceremony attended by the donor family, the local press, and occasionally a representative from the Boston mayor’s office.

The lit tree on the Common is the largest Christmas tree in Boston. It is featured every year in the local Christmas Eve broadcasts. The donor card displayed at the base of the tree names the family that grew it, names the Nova Scotian town it came from, and names the reason it is there.

The reason is always the same: In gratitude to the city of Boston for relief sent to Halifax after the explosion of 6 December 1917.

What survives

A few specific objects connect the modern tradition back to the original event.

The telegraph key used by Vince Coleman to send his last message before the explosion — Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys. — is on display in the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa.

The Boston-Halifax Christmas Tree donor cards from 1971 to the present are archived at the Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax. The cards are kept in a single small file box. Each is a slip of paper roughly the size of a postcard, naming a family and a place. There are 55 cards in the box. There will be a 56th this December.

The original 1918 Halifax thank-you tree did not, by all available accounts, survive its single season on the Common. The Boston Parks Department’s record for January 1919 notes only that the tree was “removed and disposed of after the holiday.” Its disposition is not specified. It was probably, in the practical fashion of Boston municipal services of the time, turned into firewood.