Kicker: A Christmas Cinderella story

MARY REICHARD, HOST: President Trump and first lady Melania received this year’s White House Christmas tree on Monday. It was the first time that a president has accompanied the First Lady for this duty.

The Marine band played Christmas carols and a horse-drawn carriage delivered the tree.

The tree once stood in the North Carolina mountains. Larry Smith owns the tree farm and he says the selection of the tree is a “Cinderella story.”

You see, Larry Smith’s family has grown trees since 1977. He said he didn’t think much of this particular one. He hadn’t trimmed it in a couple of years and had—in his words—“basically abandoned it.”

He thought the two White House officials who visited his farm would choose a different tree.

But the 20-foot Mountain Top Fraser Fir now stands in the Blue Room of the White House.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) The White House Christmas Tree, presented to President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump by the Smith family of the Mountain Top Fraser Fir farm in Newland, N.C., arrives on a horse-drawn carriage on the North Lawn driveway of the White House, in Washington, Monday, Nov. 19, 2018. 

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