You want the man who takes care of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree to be a New Yorker. And while Erik Pauze, head gardener at the landmark Midtown complex, wasn’t exactly born on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, he comes close enough: raised in Westchester County; resides in North Bayshore, Long Island.

At 7:30 on a recent morning, Mr. Pauze was contentedly sipping tea at a Dean & DeLuca abutting Rockefeller Plaza. He had already been at work for two hours. Fifty yards away stood his most demanding client: a 71-foot tall, 40-foot wide, 9-ton Norway spruce.

“Every day and every night I’m thinking about that tree,” said Mr. Pauze. “I got a 9-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son who ask me about it every day.”

And now he’s being pestered by a 40-year-old reporter. He doesn’t seem to mind. The brawny, sweet-natured Mr. Pauze – who could easily pick up some extra cash across Fifth Avenue playing Santa for Saks – comes off as supremely contented. You would be too if you knew what you wanted to do with your life before you were out of short pants and got your dream job straight out of college.

“I remember going to my aunt’s house in Goshen, N.Y.,” he recalled. “I would plant little twigs thinking they would grow into trees, not knowing when I left my aunt went and ripped them all out.” He got his degree in horticulture in 1988 at SUNY Farmingdale, spending two summers prior to graduating helping out the gardening crew at Rockefeller Center. When a man on the staff retired, he stepped in. A few years later, he was head gardener. He considers himself “very lucky.”

“Lucky” is a word he uses with frequency. They were lucky to find this year’s tree in nearby Suffern, N.Y. (as opposed to Ottawa, Canada, where the 1966 fir hailed from). They were lucky to transport the monolithic evergreen to the plaza with a minimum of broken branches. No electrical shorts, no freezing of the water in the tree base, no problems yet with the pricey, new, custom-made Swarovski star, composed of 25,000 crystals. “I go to sleep comfortable every night,” he said.

So, too, do Christine Gabrielides and Demos Kontos, the couple who happily welcomed the Rockefeller Center scouts onto their Fairview Terrace front yard, where the spruce had grown for 50 years. Oddly enough, the plant began its life the way it will end it – as a Christmas tree. A previous owner of the house liked one yuletide pine so much he later planted it on the lawn. That’s right – none other than Mr. Pauze’s childhood gardening method. Only this time it worked: The thing took root.

The Norway spruces that habitually inhabit Rockefeller Plaza are always found in someone’s yard. There’s a reason for that (and it isn’t because it makes for a good news story). The species is not native to the United States. So, it grows not as a forest dweller but as a suburban loner. Unchallenged by rival foliage, they attain the hearty heights and breadths that appeal to Rockefeller Center landlords Tishman Speyer.

One would expect a family to grow attached to so big and old an object, but, according to Pauze, no one has ever turned his saws away. “Not that I’ve experienced. No tree huggers,” he said. “It’s a big festival day, let me tell you. It’s a lot of fun. The whole town comes out. They find out the tree’s getting cut. This year, I went to a deli be fore to get a cup of tea, and there were people talking about it in there.” He estimates a couple hundred people, including Suffern’s mayor, gathered to see 2004’s evergreen fall.

After that, it was on to a “job specific” trailer that can to telescoped to the tree’s length and is used only one night a year, otherwise cooling its wheels in New Jersey. The super-secret nighttime journey this year involved the closing of the Tappan Zee Bridge and a police escort down silent, early-morning Fifth Avenue.

“Last year, we took the tree on the ferry from New London, Conn.,” Mr. Pauze remembered, as if talking about a particularly zestful New Year’s Eve bash. “It was awesome. We had a barbecue all night on the ferry. We didn’t sleep too much. Came in on the West Side, over by the Circle Line. I don’t know what time it was when we came in. We had too much fun.”

Mr. Pauze does not have to bother with the 5 miles of lights that adorn each branch of the tree, though he does check the connections every morning. The strands are aglow from 5:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. daily. So, what would be the monthly electric bill on that? Mr. Pauze is stumped. We turn to Rockefeller Center publicist Maya Israel. “The whole experience is priceless,” offered Ms. Israel. That’s a good publicist.

Until January 6, Mr. Pauze will inspect the elevator cables that hold the landmark into place and sweep up every needle as it drops daily. After that, the spruce will live on in a number of surprising ways. Three tons of mulch will carpet the many camps of the Boy Scouts of American. Sections on the trunk will become part of the polar bear habitat at the Bronx Zoo. And, most bizarrely, the largest part of the trunk will become an obstacle jump for the U.S. Equestrian Team in Gladstone, N.J. Its training grounds are already littered with several Stumps of Christmas Past.

If you think Erik Pauze ‘s job infects him with a bad case of Christmas cheer, you’d be right. He’s still hanging lights on his Long Island home, which is surrounded by some seasonal lawn statuary, including a Santa, a snowman, two reindeer, and a blow-up polar bear (an homage to the tree’s owners-to-be, perhaps). “My wife is still yelling at me, ‘You’ve got enough lights.’ Not yet.”

Mr. Pauze cut his day short the day he spoke to the Sun. He and others on the staff were taking a trip to visit Frank Lee, the former head gardener, now retired. Mr. Lee held the job for 47 years. Mr. Pauze has filled his shoes for the past 11, and to hear him talk, 36 more Christmases would be just fine.

“I’m not going anywhere. I love this job.”