Henninger Provides Fast Turn-Around Finishing for the 2025 National Christmas Tree Lighting Special

On Thursday, December 4, 2025, President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump lit the National Christmas Tree in front of a live audience at The Ellipse at President’s Park near the White House. Performers such as Alana Springsteen, The Beach Boys, Brett Young, Gabby Barrett, Jillian Cardarelli, Jon Pardi, Matthew West, and Warren Zeiders sang a variety of holiday classics. Musical director Tariqh Akoni and the U.S. Navy Band Commodores also lent their considerable talents to the program.

When the event began at 6pm ET, the clock for our post production team started running. We’ve worked on previous National Christmas Tree lighting specials, but never one with such a tight timeline to air.

Henninger worked with White Rose Way Entertainment Executive Producers Kristi Foley and Leon Knoles who have produced the National Christmas Tree special for a number of years on behalf of the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation. Shoot footage from more than a dozen cameras was rushed to Henninger after the event so that ingest could begin at approximately 9:30pm. Multi-cam editing in AVID started almost immediately.

White Rose Way Entertainment’s team, which also included Associate Director Paige Rabban Hadley, Editor Bill Miller and ProTools Engineer Anthony Lalumia, worked with the Henninger team through the night to edit the program to the broadcast clock, perform quality control checks on video and audio levels, create and add closed captioning and upload a broadcast-ready file to Great American Family within 12 hours (by 9:30am Friday morning). An additional seamless streaming version was then edited together and uploaded several hours later. Coffee, snacks (chocolate!) and breakfast bagels were employed to keep everyone going through the night. The program was broadcast on Great American Family at 8pm ET on Friday, December 5th.

CTO Sam Crawford and Chief Engineer Aaron Rehm led the Henninger team, which also included Christopher Campbell, Donna Gureckas, Kim Howell Cates, Mark Moore, Renata Ocampo, Heather Sipe and Ari Zagnit.

As is the key to any fast-moving project, we did a lot of prep work in the days and weeks leading up to the event with the Great American Family team as well as the truck operators to nail down technical specs. We delivered several test files ahead of time to ensure smooth sailing with the upload connection and speed.

Congratulations to the White Rose Way Entertainment team on another successful special and thank you to all the Henninger team members who supported them.