A Texas Mall Has Been Home to the Country's Tallest Indoor Christmas Tree for Over Three Decades

Malls are a hub for holiday shopping, but they're also a great place to go if you want a photo-op with Santa Claus or to see incredible decorations like giant wreaths, bows, and lights. One of the most impressive holiday sights that many shopping malls display? A giant Christmas tree. While the one at your local shopping center might be impressive in it's own right, few could measure up to the 95-foot-tall tree that you'll find in the Galleria Dallas shopping mall in Dallas, Texas.

The tannenbaum is the tallest indoor Christmas tree in the country, and the towering display has been a holiday tradition in Texas since 1984. This year's assembly of the tree began on November 7 and took about five days to complete. The five-ton decoration has an ice-skating rink at its base that garners more skaters than Rockefeller Center in New York City does, according to officials at Galleria.

Due to its size, the evergreen requires thousands of decorations to make it a true holiday spectacle. It's strung with 450,000 twinkling LED lights, 10,000 ornaments, and then it's topped off with a 100-pound, 10-foot-tall star. It takes nearly 50 people and around 48 hours to erect the tree, and assemble its more than 1,700 branches.

During the Grand Tree Lighting Celebrations, called Missile Toes, a back-flipping Santa Claus shoots fireworks off his skates—a tradition the mall has had since 1993. The Santa suit is a customized pyrotechnical system that took more than five years to construct. If you make it to the Galleria shopping mall this holiday season, be sure to also check out its 44 palm trees, two 36-foot-trees, two 12-foot trees, and six 9-foot trees all covered in twinkling lights.