The 2017 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has had many lives. Here’s its latest

Christmas trees rarely stay rooted in one place, but the Norway spruce that stood in Jason Perrin’s State College backyard had a longer journey than most when it went to New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza.

Now, however, part of the tree has temporarily returned to the area — as a custom-made table.

Perrin received a cutting from the tree, and, in hopes of making something to remember the experience, took the cutting to Windy Hill Furniture, a family-owned store in Tyrone managed by sisters Ehren Borst and Sarah Franks, and owned by their parents.

The furniture store specializes in custom-built wooden furniture, Borst said, and usually, the store will have a customer come in with an idea for a piece of furniture, which the store will then execute. Having material that was customer provided was unusual, but recognizing that it was a unique circumstance, they wanted to help Perrin remember it.

“It was neat for us to be a part of it, and be able to help him create something to preserve the memory of that little piece of history for him,” Borst said.

After Perrin approached the store with the slab and the idea of making some type of table, they worked together to determine that something like a coffee table would be a good idea, Borst said. They estimated that the tree was around 86 or 87 years old, Borst said, based on the rings they counted from Perrin’s cutting.

To ensure that the slab didn’t split, they needed a kiln, and to find a kiln that would work, they turned to an Amish shop in Ohio specializing in log and slab tables. Originally, Borst said, they estimated that the slab would take five to six months to kiln dry.

Due to how thick the tree was and how slow they had to dry it in order to prevent major splitting, she said, it took the shop closer to 10-11 months to kiln dry the slab before it was ready to be planed and finished and have a base attached.

Now, the table is back from Ohio and at the Windy Hill store, and has completed its transformation from tree to tree-like table.

“I mean, it’s amazing, it’s literally nothing that you will see anywhere. So it’s really, really neat,” Sarah Franks said.

In addition to Perrin’s table, the rest of the famous tree has been given another purpose as well. It was turned into lumber and donated to Habitat for Humanity in order to help build a new home for a family in New York, as reported by the CDT in June.

“Obviously the tree being in New York was really exciting, but it was also fantastic that the wood was recycled for a home,” Perrin said.

The tree’s transformation even earned an article in the December 2018 edition of O, the Oprah Magazine.

Like the tree, Perrin too has moved to a new place: Gettysburg.

“They cut the tree down in State College and I sold the house about two weeks later, so that tree was kind of the end of my time in State College, really,” Perrin said.

Though both of them have uprooted from State College, Perrin still has the “fond memory” of donating the tree.

“I thought it was a lot of fun,” Perrin said. And he has the table as another reminder, which he hopes to bring to his current house.

“It just seemed like it would be a good keepsake from the event.”

This story was originally published December 19, 2018 at 2:09 PM.