After holiday, Rockefeller tree used by Habitat for Humanity

For the ninth year in a row, the tree set aglow during a televised ceremony and visited by an estimated 500,000 people each year, will be milled into lumber for Habitat for Humanity projects.

Workers at the Rockefeller Center construction site in 1931 took up a collection to buy a Christmas tree, while the first official lighting was held in 1933.

Pamela Banks, a 49-year-old mother of seven, said she didn't know anything about the tree's history until Habitat officials at the Philadelphia affiliate delivered news that her house would include some of the 2014 lumber.

Banks is looking forward to a basement where her 8- and 10-year-old sons can play, bedrooms where they can study undisturbed and enough living space to host her five grown daughters and their families for big meals.