Idaho Will Provide The 2026 Capitol Christmas Tree

It will be a busy two months coming up for those involved in the preparation and transport of this year's U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree. This year's selection, courtesy of the Gem State.

“It's coming off of the Salmon River Ranger District on the southern half of our forest; It's a grand fir, it's 80 foot tall”, noted Heath Perrine of the U.S. Forest Service's Nez Perce/Clearwater National Forest in Idaho.

“I believe is the first time a grand fir has been selected as the nation's capital Christmas tree,” Perrine added.

He said the amount of effort since last winter in searching for what became the selected U.S. Capitol Christmas tree this year.

“We did a rollout to the forest this winter and we let people know that we were going to be providing the tree for 2026,” said Perrine. “And so, we encouraged employees as part of their normal duties as they go out into the woods and do their normal work if they saw a good candidate for a tree to make note of it and submit it as a potential candidate. You're looking for a tree that's pretty on all angles. We were wanting to send a larger tree so we were asking people to look for trees that were between 80 and 100 feet tall.”

Perrine said there was not a set tree variety in mind for Idaho's gift to the nation.

“We were encouraging lots of different candidates based on species,” Perrine noted. “One really cool thing about the Nez Perce/Clearwater National Forest is that we have a lot of diverse species across the forest. Our state tree, the western white pine, is abundant. Lots of fur options between Douglas fir, grand fir, subalpine fir. We were even entertaining western red cedar. Through that process, we got about 40 potential candidates and then the leadership for this project, we actually went out and looked at all of them and refined that to a much smaller list of 12.”

Once finalists were selected, the architect of the Capitol paid a visit to the Gem State this past July.

“And we took him to each of these 12 trees, and from there he was able to make a selection for the best one to send,” Perrine said.

With the tree selected, what's next?

Collection of ornaments from Idaho that will adorn the Capitol Christmas tree and companion trees throughout federal offices in the nation's capital.

“We're responsible for providing 10,000 ornaments; 6,500 of those are small and 3,500 of those are large,” said Perrine. “The amount of ornaments that have been coming in from our local communities, from just 4-H clubs and local youth clubs, senior citizen center put together some.”

The tour of the tree's home state will proceed the cross-country trek with the arrival of the tree to the Capitol grounds scheduled for the week prior to Thanksgiving.

“Harvest will be at the end of October and then we'll be gently packaging it up, taking it out of the woods,” said Perrine. “And then from there, about the end of October, we will start our official whistle stop.”

Set up a decoration of the tree that occurs for lighting ceremonies sometime after Thanksgiving.

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