The project to deliver a 20m-high Norwegian spruce to Trafalgar Square each Christmas

Christmas can feel like a busman’s holiday for project professionals. It’s a complex business: sourcing gifts, coordinating roast dinners, managing stakeholders as they fight over the TV remote. And your deadline is as fixed as St Nick’s. But, for some in the trade, the workload is even greater – because it’s their job to help make Yuletide merry.

Consider Knut Johansson, the man behind the huge Norwegian Christmas tree that adorns London’s Trafalgar Square every year.

O Christmas Tree

Johansson is Forest Manager for the municipality of Oslo. He’s responsible for choosing and nurturing a 20m‑high Norwegian spruce every year to send to the UK – a gift given by Norway as thanks for support in the Second World War.

Thousands will gather to sing carols, eat roasted chestnuts and take selfies in London’s Trafalgar Square this Christmas. What they won’t see is the work that went into its tree – which began many years before and 1,000 miles away, with Johansson and his team scouting the forests around Oslo for the best candidates.

The task: to identify 30 young trees that, at six to eight metres tall, showed signs they’d develop into a vibrant, perfectly conical specimen. But, as trees slowly mature in that forest, they may be buffeted by wind, rain, heavy snow, fungus and tunnelling bark beetles. If they survive all that, they may still develop into the wrong shape or lose their lustre.

“It’s not a factory; these are trees out in the forest,” says Johansson. “Out of 30 trees, maybe three will turn out nice.”

A few years ago, the team had chosen their tree, only for it to be struck by lightning. They had to hurry back to the woods to find a replacement that was tall enough.

“That was not the best tree we’ve ever sent,” says Johansson. “But this is what happens. This is nature.” This is also project management.

Driving (and sailing) home for Christmas

In Norway, Johansson’s arboreal duties continue long after the tree has been picked. Stakeholders ask a lot of questions of him, too. After a felling ceremony in November – attended by the Lord Mayor of Westminster and the Mayor of Oslo, alongside choirs of local carol‑singing school kids – the tree has to be loaded onto a truck and carried for 170km; transferred to a boat and ferried across the sea; and then taken by road to Central London, where it’s stood beside Nelson’s Column and dressed in vertical strings of lights (energy‑efficient, naturally). The voyage takes several days.

Johansson has been in charge since 2010. When the salt water of a rough sea crossing made all the needles fall off, he sent a new tree on the next boat. When too many branches broke on one crossing, he had to send replacement branches and a guy to mount them. And one year the tree was damaged irreparably on the way to the port, with the boat due in a matter of hours.

“You have to remember the tree you passed on the way to the ferry that looked quite good,” Johansson explains, of the drastic measures sometimes required to prevent a nightmare before Christmas. “Maybe you can steal it.”

Bah, humbug!

As any parent will know, the work of Christmas isn’t done and dusted just because you’ve delivered the gifts. There soon comes the moment of unwrapping – which means real‑time feedback on whether you got the job all wrong. Some are better at masking their distaste than others. Johansson has had to grow used to online mockery of the Trafalgar Square tree – from social media users and reputable media outlets alike.

“Nothing says global Britain like a half‑dead tree,” wrote one commentator last Christmas. Johansson points out that people have a habit of making uncharitable remarks when the tree is first lifted off the truck. At that point its branches, which are tied to the trunk for transport, have yet to be loosened, or any broken ones replaced.

“Perhaps we don’t prioritise a perfect Disney shape, but we always do what we can to make a tree that we’re proud of,” says Johansson. “It’s a nice tradition. But it’s apparently very important to be the first person to take a photo when it looks terrible, to put on the internet.”