Tis the season to buy a Christmas tree, but it takes a lot of people and business planning

to get that perfect tree all the way to your home.

PBS News digital video producer Tim McPhillips visited one stop along the route.

You might say this is where the Christmas season truly begins at a produce auction in the heart of Pennsylvania.

Freshly cut, the roughly 45,000 Christmas trees behind me are here for a single purpose,

to be auctioned off in just a single day. This isn't just any auction, though. This one is billed as the largest Christmas tree auction in the world.

The Christmas tree auction started in 1989.

Ben Courtney is the operations manager at Buffalo Valley Produce Auction in Miflinburg, Pennsylvania,

which holds this event every year.

His father, Neil, is the auctioneer.

We had about 3,000 trees back then, and it's been kind of growing ever since.

The full auction runs across a Thursday and Friday in late November.

Before the trees go on the block, multiple auctioneers snake their way through rows of Christmas

decorative.

Reiths large and small, Santa-themed planters, chainsaw reindeer, and more,

all laid out in an open-air warehouse the size

of an airplane hanger.

But on Friday, it's the trees time to shine.

Most of the trees being auctioned off behind me are from here in Pennsylvania and from North

Carolina.

But others have traveled from as far west as Oregon and as far north as Canada.

So they started arriving about nine days before the auction.

...